George Ainslie
Professor of Economics
University of Cape Town, South Africa
Professor of Economics
University of Cape Town, South Africa
George Ainslie is a research psychiatrist at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Coatesville, PA, and Professor of Economics at 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.