Mario Rizzo is the Co-Director of the Classical Liberal Institute and a Professor of Economics at NYU. He is also the Director of the Program on the Foundations of the Market Economy in the Department of Economics and the chairman of the Colloquium on Market Institutions and Economic Processes. He has been a law and economics fellow at Yale Law School and the University of Chicago Law School. He teaches a yearly seminar at NYU School of Law called “Classical Liberalism.” He is the author of many articles in economics and in law journals. His most recent books are Escaping Paternalism: Rationality, Behavioral Economics, and Public Policy (co-authored with Glen Whitman, Cambridge University Press 2020) and Austrian Economics Re-Examined: The Economics of Time and Ignorance (co-authored with Gerald P. O’Driscoll, Jr., Routledge 2014).

Professor Rizzo’s current research is focused on new or soft paternalism, behavioral economics, and the economic theory of rationality. He is completing a book on the subject.

His research is grounded on four fundamental premises: (1) the decentralization of knowledge in a complex society, such as ours, is important in the explanation of both economic and social phenomena; (2) human action should be understood in a contextual way — both the individual and social context is needed to make sense of what people do and how they relate to one another; (3) these phenomena are, wherever possible, best viewed as processes in time; and (4) economic and social policies usually have important unintended consequences.