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February 11, 2001

Following the Money, but Also the Mind

By LOUIS UCHITELLE

Correction Appended

IN the histories of economics still to be written, the spring of 1994 will almost certainly be

flagged as momentous. That is when an ophthalmologist's son from Main Line Philadelphia

-- David Laibson -- received his Ph.D. in economics, qualifying with a thesis about willpower

and money that drew as much on psychology and quirky behavior as on standard

economics. Harvard quickly hired him, becoming the first university to deliberately recruit

an economics professor trained as a behavioral economist.

Behavioral economics had finally arrived: a discipline that for a half-century had built its

theories on the rigid assumption that people acted with rational, unemotional self-interest

had formally recognized that human beings had another, feisty, side to them.

Three years later, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology followed Harvard's lead, hiring

Sendhil Mullainathan just after he earned his Ph.D. He, too, was steeped in both psychology

and economics, as well as memories of an impoverished early childhood in rural India.

Mr. Laibson, now 34, and Mr. Mullainathan, 27, are rising stars in a generation of

economists that are gradually integrating behavioral economics into mainstream theory.

Many are still graduate students. They are bunched at prestigious training centers --

Harvard, M.I.T., Stanford, the University of Chicago, Princeton, Yale, the University of

California at Berkeley. And their appearance on the scene is timely.

Behavioral economists help to explain how booms persist while busts, like the one that the

United States may now be entering, are difficult to reverse. Their research sheds light on

why identity -- the traits people assign to themselves and to others -- plays a huge and often

damaging role in the economy. If the behaviorists are correct, shares of companies on the

New York Stock Exchange are overvalued and the Dow Jones industrial average has further

to fall. And if the behaviorists prevail, the mainstream view of a rational, self-regulating

economy may well be amended and policies adopted to control irrational, sometimes

destructive behavior. Twenty-five years of deregulation might lose its appeal.

''We are engaged in a conversation in economics where people who are intrigued by the

importance of psychological phenomenon are making their case to the profession at large,''

of 8Following the Money, but Also the Mind - The New York Times

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Mr. Laibson said. ''I am optimistic that we will be successful, but I cannot presume to know

the outcome. The mainstream is saying the behavior we describe may be real, but is minor.''

The behaviorists' numbers are still small -- fewer than 20 percent of the graduate students

in economics. But that is up from almost none when Mr. Laibson entered M.I.T.'s graduate

program in 1990 and Mr. Mullainathan began his graduate studies at Harvard in 1993.

''If you were to graph the number of behavioral economists on the job market, it was zero,

and then there was Laibson and me,'' Mr. Mullainathan said. ''The market saw that we did

well, and now there is a ton of graduate students on the market. Well, maybe not a ton. But

it looked to me like I was taking a big risk, and afterward, it turned out that I was at the front

end of a fad.''

Their reputations have been on the rise ever since. Mr. Laibson built his mostly on the

strength of an ''anomaly'' that he had described about people and money. When people

expect money but have not yet received it, they are capable of planning, quite rationally, howmuch of it to spend immediately and how much to save. That squares with mainstream

theory, which argues that for a modest incentive, people are willing to save and put off

spending. But when the money actually arrives, willpower breaks down and -- barring

locked-in paycheck deductions -- the money is often spent right away. The phenomenon is

called ''hyperbolic discounting,'' an economist's way of saying that a bird in hand is worth

not two in the bush, but more like six or seven.

Overspending and undersaving are indeed American characteristics that economists

struggle to explain. The mainstream argues that people save as much as they can,

voluntarily, and that if taxes are reduced, as the Bush administration proposes, people will

save a substantial portion of the windfall. Corporate America could then tap those savings to

finance investment in, say, computers, making the economy grow.

Behavioral economists say this reasoning is flawed. They contend that despite their best

intentions, most people spend almost all of any income that comes their way. Instead of

rationally balancing spending and saving over a lifetime, people are indebted from youth to

old age, the behaviorists find.

The young behavioral economists are not rebels. Neither are their mentors, the two dozen or

so older economists who converted to behavioral economics after they had become

university professors. The first was Richard H. Thaler, now 55, the University of Chicago

economist who teamed up with two psychologists in the 1970's; out of their collaboration

came the early findings of behavioral economics.

Rather than reject mainstream theory, behaviorists embrace its emphasis on rational, self-

interested behavior. But they insist on amendments. The economy, they argue, also

responds to skewed reasoning, self-indulgence, self-destructive behavior and a host of other

human frailties and strengths. Lately, a few behavioralists have ventured beyond

psychology, wading into sociology and anthropology to help explain the dynamics of the

economy.





''Our vision is that all economics will be seen as behavioral economics,'' write three of the

mentors -- George Lowenstein at Carnegie Mellon Institute, Colin F. Camerer at the

California Institute of Technology, and Matthew Rabin at Berkeley -- in the introduction to a

collection of essays on behavioral economics to be published this year. In their vision, ''the

strict rationality assumptions that many economists still embrace may someday be seen as a

quaint, unrealistic, special case.''

First, They Do the Math

The human mind, the behaviorists say, lacks the circuitry at this stage of evolution to

produce a well-functioning market system where people interact freely in pursuit of their

preferences. Adam Smith knew this. So did David Ricardo, Karl Marx, Alfred Marshall and

John Maynard Keynes. In fact, almost all the great economists incorporated complex

psychology into their thinking.

But in the mid-20th century, economics veered. Economists increasingly thought ofthemselves as practicing a science, which, like physics, was one that could be modeled and

explained through mathematical equations. Those equations -- not words -- soon became

the language of economics. Rational, self-interested behavior -- a world in which people

responded to changes in prices and wages but not to emotion or one another's actions --

most easily fit into these new equations.

Even now, words have made only a modest comeback. Mostly, the math is becoming more

complicated, to accommodate the rebirth of psychology in economics. Mr. Laibson, who was

an economics major as a Harvard undergrad, and Mr. Mullainathan, a computer science

major at Cornell, are skilled in the techniques of complex equations. They fill their research

papers with algebraic calculations. That is partly good strategy, because behavioral

economists want to be taken seriously by their mainstream colleagues. And math is the

route to acceptance.

''I have encouraged the young guys to play by the rules, because otherwise they will be

ignored,'' Mr. Thaler said.

The strategy is working. Even diehard rationalists like Robert E. Lucas, a Nobel laureate at

the University of Chicago, allow that there are enough puzzles in savings behavior to

consider Mr. Laibson's hyperbolic-discounting thesis. But, Mr. Lucas is quick to add,

mainstream economic theory answers most questions well enough. ''For the price of

gasoline, the model we have is sufficient,'' he said. ''If the price goes up, people rationally use

less. The psychological processes involved when people alter their behavior are not

something we have to think about.''

Kevin Murphy, another University of Chicago economist, said that in time, behavioral

economics might provide better explanations than mainstream theory does for some

phenomena. But right now, he said, what the behaviorists see as irrational, the

mainstreamers can often interpret as rational choice. Eating greasy, high-fat hamburgers

too often can cost people their health. ''But if people accustom their taste so that they enjoy

hamburgers,'' Mr. Murphy said, ''then trading health for taste is a rational preference.''





Behavioral economics may also change the prevailing wisdom about deregulation, a process

that began under President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970's, when the airlines were freed

and interest rate ceilings were lifted. Deregulation enjoys strong support from mainstream

economists, who believe that a free-market system works best when left in the public's

rational hands. California's experience with electric power, however, challenges the efficacy

of deregulation. So does gambling, which can be addictive, the behavioral economists say --in contrast to mainstream thinking, which holds that people who gamble rationally choose

what they prefer to do.

So far, the behavioral economists balk at government rules that try to offset human

shortcomings in the marketplace. But the question intrigues them.

''We don't yet understand the phenomena well enough to make policy recommendations,''

Mr. Laibson said. For now, he would confine solutions to the private sector. For example, he

might encourage automatic payroll deductions to build up 401(k) savings -- unless an

employee went to the trouble to opt out. Most people are not so activist by nature, the behavioral economists have found.

''It is certainly true,'' Mr. Laibson said, ''that by raising these issues, we are opening the door

to a debate about government's role in the markets.''

Rose-Colored Hindsight

Nothing gets more support from the behaviorists than the view that the stock market

responds not to corporate reality, but to the moods of investors -- their herd behavior, their

overestimation of their investing skills, their reluctance to sell a falling stock andacknowledge a loss, and their gambler's view that stock-market gains are like ''house

money'': it can be left on the table for more action.

That is just one reason that behavioral economists -- particularly Robert J. Shiller of Yale --

are convinced that stock trading is irrational. ''People get overconfident,'' Mr. Shiller said.

''Their egos become involved, and they are fooled by hindsight bias.'' Using hindsight, he

explained, ''they think it must have been obvious to people in the 1920's that a stock market

crash was coming.''

If what was happening then were happening now, investors would see the writing on the

wall. ''Since they don't see a crash coming now, ergo, there is no crash coming,'' he said.

Above all, behaviorists contend, standard theory fails to recognize that people take shortcuts

in thinking, in effect bypassing rational analysis. People are prone, for example, to

''representative'' thinking and to ''categorization,'' both often leading to false conclusions.

Consider categorization. Many people see a black woman walking with young children and

think she is a single mother who is or has been on welfare. That shortcut in thinking helps to

explain why black people constantly confront irrational barriers to jobs or good pay.

The effects of such lazy thinking can multiply, at times harmfully. ''When people do

differentiate between middle-class blacks and poor blacks, then the poor blacks get pushed





further down in the eyes of people who might employ them,'' Mr. Mullainathan said.

''Mainstream economics says that a strong economy makes all boats rise. But categorization

gives a different slant.''

In representation, the present becomes representative of the future. The economy booms for

several years, and people conclude that the good times will continue indefinitely. When a

recession arrives unexpectedly, their reckless spending and borrowing can haunt them. The

recession then becomes the yardstick for viewing the future, and excessive caution can

prolong the hard times.

''The big question is: How sophisticated are people as they go through the world, and what

do they choose to see and not to see?'' Mr. Laibson said.

Not all the behavior in the new economics is ornery. Alongside self-interest, there are places

in the human psyche for altruism, loyalty, fairness and a willingness to reciprocate. Various

experiments have demonstrated how common these qualities are. They help to explain theenvironmental movement and volunteer work, as well as the dedication of job holders to

their daily tasks in return for a wage above what the market requires.

''We did some work on firms that were insulated from takeovers, and what effect that had on

real behavior,'' Mr. Mullainathan said. Studying such companies, he found that their

managers, freed from the fear of takeover, were less concerned about cost-cutting and, as a

result, paid higher wages to their workers.

The rationalists argue that workers can make life difficult, so managers with a little

flexibility pay them off to reduce their own stress. ''But when I describe the research in myclass,'' Mr. Mullainathan said, ''several people say, 'Oh, could it be that the managers like

their workers and want to be fair.' ''

Such findings have drawn a few radical economists into behavioral economics, including

Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis, at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. As

graduate students at Harvard in the late 1960's, they turned to Marxism and the protest

movement against the Vietnam War, not so much because of political ideology, they now

argue, but because the dominant economics took too narrow a view of human motivation.

''We were trained in models of the economy that we did not believe,'' said Mr. Bowles, who

has been an outspoken critic of mainstream theory. ''Behavioral economics is not

challenging the mainstream concept that selfishness is an important motive; what we are

challenging is that it is the only motive.''

Mr. Gintis and Mr. Bowles say they are now comfortable with several findings of the

behaviorists. Their own work on fairness depends on the idea that sharing and reciprocity

are important impulses in the human psyche. On taxes, for example, people willingly pay

their fair share, Mr. Gintis says, until they perceive that some businesses or individuals do

not and that the Internal Revenue Service fails to prosecute them. ''Then they reciprocate bycheating, too,'' he said.





The setting of wages also reflects the complexities of human psychology, the behavioral

economists argue. Wages should fall when unemployment is high and idle workers are eager

to land jobs. But employers do not cut wages. They might not raise them by enough to keep

up with inflation, but they almost never reduce them. They refrain out of a sense of fairness

or loyalty or friendship, particularly in small offices, or because of a realization that if wages

were cut, workers would reciprocate by dragging their feet on the job. In fact, wages areoften kept above what the market requires, to raise morale and to motivate workers. The

unemployed may offer to work for less, but they are not hired.

This managerial reasoning is known as the ''efficiency wage,'' a concept described more than

25 years ago by George A. Akerlof when behavioral economics was hardly a speck. In 1966,

while Mr. Gintis and Mr. Bowles were beginning their graduate studies in economics at

Harvard, Mr. Akerlof was finishing his Ph.D. across town at M.I.T. While they were

marching toward Marxism, he was moving toward behavioral economics, before it had a

name or critical mass.

''Sometimes I think that if I had known what Akerlof was doing, I would have gone in that

direction too,'' Mr. Gintis said.

Resurrected in the 70's

From Mr. Akerlof's pen, occasionally in collaboration with the economist Joseph Stiglitz,

came early descriptions of market imperfections. The most famous was described by Mr.

Akerlof in a 1970 paper, ''The Market for 'Lemons.' '' The lemons were used cars, and the

point was that car salesmen knew more about the quality of the cars they were selling than

did the buyers, and could thus overcharge. In the mainstream vision of the marketplace,

buyers and sellers are both fully informed and the agreed-upon price is the right one.

That early work was a first step toward, as Mr. Akerlof puts it, a resurrection of the

behavioral phenomena that still survived in Mr. Keynes's day, in the 30's and 40's.

By 1985, Mr. Akerlof had met the two psychologists whose research and experiments, in

collaboration with various economists, produced many early findings of behavioral

economics. One of them, Amos Tversky, died in 1996; the other, Daniel Kahneman, now at

Princeton, taught a graduate seminar on psychology and economics with Mr. Akerlof at

Berkeley.

''George did not get credit for that course,'' Dr. Kahneman recalled. ''The idea of teaching

with a psychologist was considered so flaky that he was told to do it on his own.''

Now, at 60, Mr. Akerlof is pushing behavioral economics into sociology and anthropology.

From studies of black children in inner-city schools, he and Rachel E. Kranton of the

University of Maryland have described a group identity that settles on the children, giving

them a sense of self that is linked to what they perceive as their social category. Usually that

categorization confines them, so they have to decide how to behave. The rebelliousness thatoften results has filled the jails with black young people, Mr. Akerlof said.





By altering identity -- and therefore expectations -- a few ''miracle schools'' in poor

neighborhoods have greatly improved student performance, Mr. Akerlof said, citing Central

Park East Secondary School in Harlem as an example. Mainstream economics suggests that

training and education should be enough to allow anyone to enter the world of good jobs

and should, if available, trump group identity. Mr. Akerlof's model disagrees.

''When we gave this paper at Berkeley, someone said that we had developed a terminology

that bridged economics and sociology,'' Mr. Akerlof said. ''The sociologists already knew all

this and now we are putting it in a framework that economists can understand.''

He was drawn to behavioral economics, he said, because ''the disparity between blacks and

whites'' is the most important issue in America, yet one that mainstream economics fails to

address effectively.

During his undergraduate years at Yale, he participated in civil rights protests in the South.

A year spent in India, as a young economist, introduced him to the sociology of castes, a version of discrimination. ''I used what I saw to think about things in very different ways,''

he said.

That same need to think about issues that mainstream theory does not explain also helped

to draw Mr. Laibson and Mr. Mullainathan into behavioral economics.

After growing up near Haverford, in the suburbs of Philadelphia, where his father was a

noted ophthalmologist, Mr. Laibson went to Harvard with only a vague understanding of

economics. It bothered him in those early economics courses to have to assume perfect

rationality. ''I wondered what was missing,'' he said.

What opened his eyes was that first year in graduate school, when M.I.T. offered a course in

behavioral economics taught by Peter Diamond, an economist, and Drazen Prelec, a

psychologist. ''I had thought that economics was about saving the world,'' Mr. Laibson said,

''but I see now that it is about asking and answering fascinating questions.''

Mr. Mullainathan is constantly aware of the very different life he would have lived had his

father not become an engineer, found work in Los Angeles and then brought his wife and

young son from India in 1980. Even now, visiting relatives in India, the son meets boyhood

playmates who are sharecroppers earning $150 a year. And when his father was briefly out

of work in California, the son worried that his family would slip back into poverty.

He entered Cornell intending to be a computer engineer, but he took courses taught by two

behavioral economists -- Robert Frank, a labor expert, and Mr. Thaler, the pioneer in mixing

psychology and economics. Through them, he saw economics connecting with his own

experience. ''I really decided at that point that I wanted to do economics and I wanted to

bridge this divide between the real world and the theoretical world,'' Mr. Mullainathan said.

Moving to the Next Level





The research goes on. Mr. Laibson is trying to understand ''cueing'' as a phenomenon in

economics. Cueing helps to explain why advertising works; it refers to the stimuli that

arouse latent desires or draw a cured addict back to his addiction.

Hotel room minibars provide considerable stimuli when small liquor bottles are displayed

on the refrigerator door, behind a wire mesh. ''Think about what it must be like for the

recovering alcoholic to sit in that hotel room and stare at that alcohol for three hours before

he goes to bed,'' Mr. Laibson said, suggesting that regulation might be in order. ''That

alcohol is a very powerful cue,'' he said, ''and it may be inappropriate for a recovering

alcoholic to endure that experience.''

While Mr. Laibson describes specific phenomena, Mr. Mullainathan searches for patterns in

human behavior -- for example, how investors make decisions. From his research, he

concludes that people put stocks into categories just as they put people into categories,

arbitrarily classifying a General Electric as a technology stock and a Cisco Systems as a

glamour stock. They trade them accordingly, until something happens, then reclassify theminto new categories, he says.

''When I see a common thread, that gets me going,'' Mr. Mullainathan said. From this sort of

broad understanding may someday come more effective monetary policy.

''I would love to see how Alan Greenspan would behave 80 years from now, when economics

is much more behavioral,'' Mr. Mullainathan said. ''We cannot know, of course. But one

thing we do know: 80 years from now he would behave differently than he is behaving

today, and that is kind of cool.''

Photos: More than 25 years ago, before behavioral economics had a name or critical mass,

George A. Akerlof was doing some pioneering work in the field. (Peter DaSilva for The New

York Times); Sendhil Mullainathan, 27, at M.I.T., and David Laibson, 34, at Harvard, are

rising stars in a generation of economists that are gradually integrating behavioral

psychology into mainstream economic theory. (Rick Friedman for The New York Times)(pg.

11); (Illustration by The New York Times)(pg. 1)

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