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Mr Thaler, an American born in New Jersey in 1945, spent most of his early career at Cornell University before moving to the University of Chicago in 1995.
賽勒，這位1945年出生在新澤西州的美國人，在1995年轉投芝加哥大學之前，在康奈爾大學渡過了他早期學術生涯的大部分時間。
Unusually for an economist, he is known for the clarity of his ideas and the quality of his writing.
對于一位經濟學家來說，不同尋常的是，他以觀點的明晰和寫作的質量而著稱。
“Nudge”, a book co-written with Cass Sunstein, is both an extraordinarily influential work and a bestseller.
《助推》(Nudge)，這本他與凱斯·桑斯坦合寫的書，既是一本具有特殊影響力的著作，也是一本暢銷書。
Its lessons have been adopted by governments across the world; “nudge units” in America and Britain studied how to boost saving and taxpaying, encourage healthy behaviour and reduce energy use.
該書的經驗教訓已經被世界各地的政府所采納：在美國和英國，“助推小組”已經對如何提高儲蓄、促進繳稅、鼓勵健康的行為和降低能源使用展開了研究。
“Nudge” drew on years of work by Mr Thaler and co-authors identifying oddities in human behaviour.
《助推》綜合了賽勒與合作者在辨識人類行為的異常方面所進行的多年研究。
Setting out to explore why people feel losses more keenly than gains, he helped uncover the endowment effect: a tendency to value something more highly just because you own it.
著手去探究為什么人們對損失比對收獲感覺更強烈的他，促成了稟賦效應——這種僅僅是因為自己擁有就將其當作寶貝的傾向——的發現。
To detect it, he distributed coffee mugs at random to half of a group of test subjects, who were then invited to sell the mug, if they wished, to the other, mugless half.
為了探究這一效應，他把咖啡杯隨機分發給了測試對象中的一半。之后，這一半測試對象受邀把杯子賣給沒有杯子的另一半，如果他們希望這做的話。
Theory would predict that those with and without mugs should value them the same, on average, and so about half of the mugs should change hands.
理論會預期，總的來說，有杯子的沒有杯子的應當對這些杯子給出一樣的估價。因而，約有一半的杯子應當換手。
In fact, those with mugs valued them more than those without.
實際上，有杯子比沒有杯子更把杯子當成寶貝。
Offers to buy the mugs by the have-nots were usually too low to convince the haves to sell, and relatively few transactions took place.
沒有杯子的出價通常又太低，沒法讓有杯子的賣出杯子，因而只有相當少的交易發生。
This finding, since replicated many times, suggested that the context of an economic choice matters.
由于被反復做了多次，這一發現表明，經濟選擇的背景很重要。
That, in turn, means that the way choices are framed, by firms or governments, can influence how people respond.
反過來，這又說說明，選擇被企業和政府所構建的方式可能影響人們如何應對。
譯文來源考研英語時事閱讀
