About

Matthew Rabin is the Pershing Square Professor of Behavioral Economics in the Harvard Economics Department and Harvard Business School. His research focuses primarily on incorporating psychologically more realistic assumptions into empirically applicable formal economic theory. His current topics of interest include errors in statistical reasoning and the evolution of beliefs, effects of choice context on exhibited preferences, reference-dependent preferences, and errors people make in inference in market and learning settings. Before his current position, he spent 25 years at the University of California, Berkeley Economics Department. He received his PhD from MIT in 1989, the same year he joined the Berkeley faculty as an assistant professor. Professor Rabin is a member of the Russell Sage Foundation Behavioral Economics Roundtable and co-organizer of the Russell Sage Summer Institute in Behavioral Economics. His honors include the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, the John Bates Clark Medal from the American Economic Association, and he is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Econometrics
• Mathematics
• Microeconomics
• Machine Learning
• Artificial Intelligence
• Economics
• Psychology
• Statistics
• Cognitive psychology
• Financial economics
• Cognitive science
• Social psychology

Selected publications

• Moral constraints and self-serving beliefs

  European Economic Review · 2026-02-05

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• GESTURE-CONTROLLED VIRTUAL MOUSE FOR HANDS-FREE NAVIGATION

  2025-01-01

  articleOpen access

  The Virtual Mouse Hand Gesture Control System introduces an innovative solution for human-computer interaction by replacing traditional hardware-based mouse devices with gesture recognition technology.This system leverages advancements in machine learning and computer vision, utilizing frameworks such as Mediapipe and OpenCV, to interpret hand gestures captured via a standard camera.This effectively frees up hardware for the control of cursor devices, as input is achieved through combinations of varying muscle movements.Key functionalities, including cursor movement, clicking, and dragging, are mapped to specific hand gestures, enabling seamless and touchfree interaction.Performance evaluations demonstrate significant improvements in accuracy and responsiveness compared to existing gesture-based systems, achieving a hand recognition accuracy of 95%.The system's adaptability across various lighting conditions ensures a reliable user experience.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Social reference dependence

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2024-06-12

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

• Social reference dependence

  AEA Randomized Controlled Trials · 2024-06-12

  dataset
  PublisherDOI

• Estimating perceptions of the relative COVID risk of different social-distancing behaviors from respondents’ pairwise assessments

  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · 2023-02-07 · 5 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  How do people compare the effectiveness of different social-distancing behaviors in avoiding the spread of viral infection? During the COVID pandemic, we showed 676 online respondents in the United States, United Kingdom, and Israel 30 pairs of brief videos of acquaintances meeting. We asked respondents to indicate which video from each pair depicted greater risk of COVID infection. Their choices imply that on average, respondents considered talking 14 min longer to be as risky as standing 1 foot closer, being indoors as standing 3 feet closer, being exposed to coughs or sneezes as 3 to 4 ft closer, greeting with a hug as 7 ft closer, and with a handshake as 5 ft closer. Respondents considered properly masking as protecting the wearer and interlocutor equally, removing the mask entirely or only when talking as standing 4 to 5 ft closer but wearing it under the nose as only 1 to 2 ft closer. We provide weaker evidence on beliefs about the interaction effects of different behaviors. In a more limited, ex post analysis, we find little evidence of differences in beliefs across subpopulations.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Expectations-Based Loss Aversion May Help Explain Seemingly Dominated Choices in Strategy-Proof Mechanisms

  American Economic Journal Microeconomics · 2022 · 46 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Economics
  • Microeconomics
  • Econometrics

  Deferred acceptance (DA), a widely implemented algorithm, is meant to improve allocations: under classical preferences, it induces preference-concordant rankings. However, recent evidence shows that—in both real, large-stakes applications and experiments—participants frequently play seemingly dominated, significantly costly strategies that avoid small chances of good outcomes. We show theoretically why, with expectations-based loss aversion, this behavior may be partly intentional. Reanalyzing existing experimental data on random serial dictatorship (a restriction of DA), we show that such reference-dependent preferences, with a degree and distribution of loss aversion that explain common levels of risk aversion elsewhere, fit the data better than no-loss-aversion preferences. (JEL D11, D82, D91)

  PublisherDOI

• Estimating Perceptions of the Relative COVID Risk of Different Social-Distancing Behaviors from Respondents' Pairwise Assessments

  National Bureau of Economic Research · 2022-09-01

  reportOpen accessSenior authorCorresponding

  How do people compare bundles of social-distancing behaviors? During the COVID pandemic, we showed 676 online respondents in the US, UK, and Israel 30 pairs of brief videos of acquaintances meeting. We asked them to indicate which in each pair depicted greater risk of COVID infection. Their choices imply that on average respondents considered talking 14 minutes longer to be as risky as standing 1 foot closer, being indoors as standing 3 feet closer, and removing a properly worn mask by either party as standing 4-5 feet closer. We explore subpopulations and perceived nonlinear and interacted effects of combined behaviors.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Estimating Perceptions of the Relative COVID Risk of Different Social-Distancing Behaviors from Respondents' Pairwise Assessments

  SSRN Electronic Journal · 2022-01-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author
  PublisherDOI

• Belief Movement, Uncertainty Reduction, and Rational Updating

  The Quarterly Journal of Economics · 2021 · 47 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Machine Learning

  Abstract When a Bayesian learns new information and changes her beliefs, she must on average become concomitantly more certain about the state of the world. Consequently, it is rare for a Bayesian to frequently shift beliefs substantially while remaining relatively uncertain, or, conversely, become very confident with relatively little belief movement. We formalize this intuition by developing specific measures of movement and uncertainty reduction given a Bayesian’s changing beliefs over time, showing that these measures are equal in expectation and creating consequent statistical tests for Bayesianess. We then show connections between these two core concepts and four common psychological biases, suggesting that the test might be particularly good at detecting these biases. We provide support for this conclusion by simulating the performance of our test and other martingale tests. Finally, we apply our test to data sets of individual, algorithmic, and market beliefs.

  PublisherDOI

• Replication package for: A Model of Relative Thinking

  Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2020-07-29

  datasetOpen access

  Data replication package for Bushong, Benjamin, Matthew Rabin, and Joshua Schwartzstein, "A Model of Relative Thinking", forthcoming, <em>The </em><em>Review of Economic Studies.</em> Contents: Stata data from two experiments and Stata .do files to replicate analyses.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• Collaborative Research on Self-Control and Consumer Choice

  NSF · $119k · 2005–2008

Frequent coauthors

• Daniel J. Benjamin

  University of California, Los Angeles

  45 shared

• Erik Eyster

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  43 shared

• Ted O’Donoghue

  37 shared

• Don A. Moore

  27 shared

• Navin Kartik

  26 shared

• Andrea Galeotti

  26 shared

• Ori Heffetz

  24 shared

• George Loewenstein

  13 shared

Education

• Ph.D., Economics

  Harvard University

  1995

• B.A., Economics

  University of California, Berkeley

  1990

Awards & honors

• Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow
• Graduate Economics Association Outstanding Teaching Award
• MacArthur Foundation Fellow
• Econometric Society Fellow
• John Bates Clark Medal from American Economic Association