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The sweet taste of a new idea | MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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Behavioral economist Sendhil Mullainathan has never forgotten the pleasure he felt the first time he tasted a delicious crisp, yet gooey Levain cookie. He compares the experience to when he encounters new ideas. “That hedonic pleasure is pretty much the same pleasure I get hearing a new idea, discovering a new way of looking at a situation, or thinking about something, getting stuck and then having a breakthrough. You get this kind of core basic reward,” says Mullainathan, the Peter de Florez Professor with dual appointments in the MIT departments of Economics and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and a principal investigator at the MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems (LIDS). Mullainathan’s love of new ideas, and by extension of going beyond the usual interpretation of a situation or problem by looking at it from many different angles, seems to have started very early. As a child in school, he says, the multiple-choice answers on tests all seemed to offer pos

Sendhil Mullainathan brings a lifetime of unique perspectives to research in behavioral economics and machine learning. Michaela Jarvis | MIT Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems Publication Date : May 19, 2025 Press Inquiries Press Contact : Amanda Moore Email: amm@mit.edu Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems Close Caption : “I wanted to be in a place where I could have one foot in computer science and one foot in a top-notch behavioral economics department,” says Professor Sendhil Mullainathan. “And really, if you just objectively said what are the places that are A-plu

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