Richard Thaler is coauthor, with Cass Sunstein, of "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness" (Yale University Press, 2008). "Nudge" discusses how public and private organizations can help people make better choices in their daily lives. "People often make poor choices—and look back at them with bafflement!" Thaler and Sunstein write. "We do this because as human beings, we all are susceptible to a wide array of routine biases that can lead to an equally wide array of embarrassing blunders in education, personal finance, health care, mortgages and credit cards, happiness, and even the planet itself." Thaler and his co-author coined
Richard Thaler writes papers that are full of common sense." Since 1991, Thaler is also the co-director of the National Bureau of Economic Research Behavioral Economics Project. Thaler was also involved in the establishment of the Behavioural Insights Team, originally part of the British Government's Cabinet Office but is now a limited company. Thaler made a cameo appearance as himself in the 2015 movie "The Big Short", which was about the credit and housing bubble collapse that led to the 2008 global financial crisis. During one of the film's expository scenes he helped pop star Selena Gomez explain the 'hot hand fallacy,'