Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson is associate professor of economics at George Mason University, and was research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University until 2024. He has a doctorate in social science from California Institute of Technology, master’s degrees in physics and philosophy from the University of Chicago, and nine years of experience as a research programmer, at Lockheed and NASA.

Hanson has 5981 citations, a citation h-index of 35, and over ninety academic publications. He is the author of The Age of Em: Work, Love and Life When Robots Rule the Earth and The Elephant in the Brain: Hidden Motives in Everyday Life. Hanson has 1100 media mentions, given 400 invited talks, and his blog OvercomingBias.com has had eight million visits.

Hanson has pioneered prediction markets, also known as information markets and idea futures, since 1988. He was the first to write in detail about creating and subsidizing markets to gain better estimates on a wide variety of important topics. He was a principal architect of the first internal corporate markets, at Xanadu in 1990, of the first web markets, the Foresight Exchange since 1994, of DARPA’s Policy Analysis Market, from 2001 to 2003, and of IARPA’s combinatorial markets DAGGRE and SCICAST from 2010 to 2015. Hanson developed new technologies for conditional, combinatorial, and intermediated trading, and studied insider trading, manipulation, and other foul play. He has written and spoken widely on the application of idea futures to business and policy, and has advised many ventures.

Hanson is recognised not only for his contributions to economics (especially, pioneering the theory and use of prediction markets), but also for the wide range of fields in which he’s been published such as spatial product competition, health incentive contracts, group insurance, product bans, evolutionary psychology and bioethics of health care, voter information incentives, incentives to fake expertise, Bayesian classification, agreeing to disagree, self-deception in disagreement, probability elicitation, wiretaps, image reconstruction, the history of science prizes, reversible computation, the origin of life, the survival of humanity, very long term economic growth, growth given machine intelligence, and interstellar colonisation.