In 2008, the behavioral economist Richard Thaler and the legal scholar Cass Sunstein published a book in which they advocated a novel approach to public policy based on the notion of a ‘nudge’. Roughly speaking, a nudge is an intervention in the decisional context that steers people’s...

I examine some neoclassical, behavioral, and heuristic models of individual decision-making, and argue that the diverse psychological mechanisms these models posit are cognitively too demanding to be implemented, consciously or unconsciously, by actual decision makers. Accordingly, these models...

This paper is the penultimate version of the Prologue to my book Measuring Utility. From the Marginal Revolution to Behavioral Economics, published in 2018 by Oxford University Press in the series Oxford Studies in the History of Economics

I examine some behavioral and heuristic models of individual decision-making and argue that the diverse psychological mechanisms these models posit are too demanding to be implemented, either consciously or unconsciously, by actual decision makers. Accordingly, and contrary to what their...

In discussing rational choice theory (RCT) as an explanation of demand behavior, Becker (1962, Journal of Political Economy, 70, 1–13) proposed a model of random choice in which consumers pick a bundle on their budget line according to a uniform distribution. This model has then been used in...