The John Bates Clark bronze medal is awarded biennially to an American economist under the age of 40 credited with making a significant contribution to economic thought and knowledge.

Another UC Berkeley economics professor in the College of Letters & Science who won the Clark Medal is Daniel McFadden, who received the medal in 1975 and shared the 2000 Nobel Prize in Economics with James Heckman of the University of Chicago. Heckman won the Clark Medal in 1983.

David Card, an empirical labor economist, won the Clark Medal in 1995 and joined the UC Berkeley faculty in 1997-98. Economist Dale W. Jorgenson of Harvard taught at UC Berkeley in the 1960s and won the Clark Medal in 1971.

Maurice Obstfeld, chair of UC Berkeley's economics department, said it is "very gratifying" to oversee a faculty that in the current school year has won a Nobel Prize and the Clark Medal.

Professor Avinash Dixit of Princeton, chair of the seven-member American Economics Association committee that recommended this year's Clark winner, said Rabin will formally receive his award in January. A committee statement called Rabin "an outstanding and strikingly original theorist" who has gone further than anyone in demonstrating the explanatory power of a new genre of rigorous economic analysis based on psychological evidence.

"For the past decade, Matthew Rabin has been at the forefront of research that has advanced economic theory by incorporating the findings of psychologists and other social scientists," Dixit said. "Rabin's theoretical modeling, grounded in deep study of the psychology literature, has enabled him to build many bridges between the disciplines, and his work has inspired others."

Contacted in London, where he is a visiting professor at the London School of Economics, the soft-spoken Rabin called the award "a very pleasant surprise. It's cliched to say, but actually true, that it's sort of humbling, given the company (of other Clark Medal winners) I'm in."

Rabin, 37, is a pioneer in psychology and economics, and the search for what's wrong or missing in existing economic models. He explores such territory as how to explain risky behavior, how people trade off well-being from one day to the next, and the different ways people evaluate their gains and losses. His research has applications to credit card debt and stock market behavior, savings, asset prices, employee/employer relations, addiction and dieting, impulse shopping and choices in health care coverage.

"Rabin's papers on the implications of people's concern for fairness, on procrastination and immediate gratification, and on drawing inferences from a small number of observations, are likely to prove important milestones on the way to a richer and more useful economic theory," Dixit said.

Rabin currently is working on a book to serve as an economist's guide to psychology and is "plugging away" on his research.

Other non-Berkeley winners of the Clark Medal include the following Nobel Prize winners in economics: Milton Friedman, Robert Solow, Paul Samuelson, James Tobin, Kenneth Arrow and Gary Becker.

Rabin earned his BA in economics and mathematics from the University of Wisconsin in 1984, and received his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1989.

In addition to the MacArthur award, Rabin won a National Science Foundation research grant in 1997 and was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto, Calif., in 1997-98. He also was an Alfred P. Sloan research fellow from 1995 to 1997 and earned the 1999-2000 outstanding teaching award from the Graduate Economics Association. He is an associate editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives.