Eldar Shafir is the William Stewart Tod Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs at Princeton University Department of Psychology and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. He is a Faculty Associate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. He is co-founder and Scientific Director at ideas42, a social-science R&D lab. His area of study is behavioral economics, that is, how the decisions people make affect their financial outcomes. His research has led him to the general conclusion that people often make inadvisable decisions on financial matters when they think they are being rational.
Eldar graduated from Brown University and received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Science in 1988 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Currently he is a Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs in Princeton University's Department of Psychology and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and a Faculty Associate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University. He is past president of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making.
He is a member of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, a research affiliate of Innovations for Poverty Action, and part of the Behavioral Economics Roundtable of the Russell Sage Foundation, among several other research organizations. He has recently been appointed by President Obama to the President’s Advisory Council on Financial Capability. The Council's task is to consider ways to strengthen financial capability across the country.
Along with Peter Diamond and Amos Tversky, Eldar is a proponent of the money illusion, compiling empirical evidence for the existence of this effect, both in experiments and in real world situations.
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