Nobel laureate Richard H. Thaler has spent his career studying the radical notion that the central agents in the economy are humans-predictable, error-prone individuals. Misbehaving is his arresting, frequently hilarious account of the struggle to bring an academic discipline back down to earth-and change the way we think about economics, ourselves, and our world.

Traditional economics assumes rational actors. Early in his research, Thaler realized these Spock-like automaton...