Arquitectura de decisiones y paternalismo libertario: hacia una microeconomía empíricamente fundamentada

One of the most important debates in the philosophy of economic science refers to the disjunctive between instrumentalism and realism. Nudge, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, represents a milestone in the development, and possibly the consolidation, of a new realist paradigm - of an empirically-based microeconomics, as the one Herbert Simon demanded - which might displace the instrumentalist paradigm that has predominated over more than a century as the theoretical foundation of political economy. Thaler and Sunstein manage to, firstly, condense a complex characterization of economic agents, based on the empirical findings that cognitive psychology and behavioral economics have been achieving over the last thirty years; and, secondly, they manage to articulate such positive characterization of economic agents to a normative proposal on public policy and institucional design.