"What Eve did in the Garden of Eden was not to eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil, but to swing on the
universal discount curve from delayed rewards, bending it permanently from a shape that had always generated
simple preferences to a shape that generates persistent motivational conflicts." --Picoeconomics, p. 85
George Ainslie is a research psychiatrist at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Coatesville, PA, and Professor, School of Economics, University of Cape Town, South Africa. After graduation from Yale College and Harvard Medical School, he began working in Richard Herrnstein's behavioral psychology laboratory while completing a psychiatric residency at Massachusetts Mental Health Center. Ainslie originally discovered hyperbolic discounting as an aspect of a broader empirical principle, Herrnstein's matching law.
George Ainslie
School of Economics
University of Cape Town, South Africa
151 Veterans Affairs Medical Center
Coatesville, PA 19320, USA
Phone: (610)384-7711 X4260
Email: George.Ainslie@va.gov
