Why Your Brain Hates Losing

Colin F. Camerer is and Robert Kirby Professor of Behavioral Economics at Caltech. He is a behavioral economist with the goal of improving the economic analysis of decisions, games, and markets. He uses methods from psychology and neuroscience, including eye-tracking, lesion patients, EEG, fMRI, wearable sensors, machine learning, and animal behavior. His recent research has focused on visual salience and habits.

Camerer received his BA in quantitative studies from Johns Hopkins University, and he holds an MBA in finance and a PhD in decision theory both from the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.

He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a fellow of the Econometric Society, and fellow of the Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory.

Camerer was president of the Society for Neuroeconomics from 2005 to 2006, president of the Economic Science Association from 2001 to 2003, and he has served on many editorial boards. He has been chair of the Russell Sage Foundation Behavioral Economics Roundtable since 2007. He has one patent accepted on “Active Learning Decision Engines.” Camerer was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2013, and he received an honorary doctorate from the Stockholm School of Economics in 2019.