HEEP Faculty Fellow Honored by the American Economic Association

HEEP Faculty Fellow Richard Zeckhauser was honored in the August 2015 issue of the American Economic Review as a Distinguished Fellow of the American Economic Association, the premier scholarly association for the field of economics. His biography in the front matter of the current issue of the AER emphasizes his decades of extensive and successful mentoring of junior faculty and graduate students. Professor Zeckhauser is the Frank Plumpton Ramsey Professor of Political Economy at the Harvard Kennedy School.

Professor Zeckhauser has made wide-ranging contributions in applied game theory, the analysis of economic behavior under uncertainty, health economics, and financial economics. His research offers a mix of both theoretical and empirical insights. Professor Zeckhauser pioneered the field of policy analysis. His current research projects analyze environmental disasters, deception and reputations, trust in Islamic and Western nations, decisions in health care, investing in highly uncertain worlds, and effective relationships between the public and private sectors. His contributions to decision theory and behavioral economics include the concepts of quality-adjusted life years (QALYs), status quo bias, betrayal aversion, and ignorance (states of the world unknown) as a complement to the categories of risk and uncertainty.

Professor Zeckhauser joined the faculty of Harvard’s Department of Economics in 1968 and has been a member of the Kennedy School’s faculty since 1970.