Adam Hayes is Professor of Sociology at the University of Lucerne in Switzerland. In a previous life, Adam was a derivatives trader and options market maker in New York, Chicago, and Amsterdam and dabbled in private wealth management. Today, he holds an MA in economics and a PhD in sociology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison and is a CFA charterholder — a combination that informs his work at the seam between economy, sociology, and financial behavior His research has appeared in top social science journals including Social Forces, Socio-Economic Review, Economy and Society, Journal of Business Research, and Sociological Theory, among others, and ranges across two main strands: the social production of economic rationality, and the sociology of financial technologies such as blockchains, AI, and algorithmic finance.

His monograph, Irrational Together: The Social Forces That Invisibly Shape Our Economic Behavior, published in 2025 by the University of Chicago Press, takes aim at one of behavioral economics' founding moves — the diagnosis of ordinary economic actors as cognitively defective — and argues instead that what looks like irrationality is often also socially produced: shaped by social position, relational ties, gendered socialization, and the institutional scaffolding of markets themselves. Drawing on original experiments, ethnographic material, and survey data spanning topics from culture and meme stocks to housing wealth and robo-advisors, Irrational Together offers a sociological reframing of why people do what they do with their money.