Daniel Kahneman

Köpmantorget, the Merchants' Square, is small and sloping, and it belongs to a bronze knight on horseback driving his lance into a dragon. It is Saint George, a copy placed here in 1912 of the medieval sculpture inside Storkyrkan. Next to him we imagine a quieter figure: Daniel Kahneman. There is no statue of him here; this is an example placement for this tour.

A square named after merchants suits him, because his work changed how economists think about people who buy and sell. Economic theory long assumed that people weigh their choices rationally. Kahneman, a psychologist, showed with his long time collaborator Amos Tversky how predictably human judgment goes wrong when we decide under uncertainty, and how convincing a mistaken intuition can feel.

In 2002 he shared the prize with Vernon L. Smith, "for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty".

Strictly speaking, his prize is not one of those Alfred Nobel founded in his will. Its full name is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, established by Sweden's central bank in 1968, more than seventy years after Nobel's death. It is presented with the Nobel Prizes each December, but its story begins in a bank.