Behavioral economics : a history

In economics, the market has been understood to steer behavior towards a competitive equilibrium in which all economic actors behave optimally, and in which welfare of society is maximized. Yet many economists have also seen shortcomings to this ideal picture of the market in the form of limited information, too few buyers or sellers, adverse selection, moral hazards, and other caveats. What psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky brought to economics in the 1980s, was the idea that imperfections in the market may in addition be caused by fallible human behavior. This resulted in a new branch of economics called behavioral economics and it won Kahneman the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2002 (Tversky had died in 1996). This book presents a history of behavioral economics. The common rationale of behavioral economics in the 1980s - 2000s was in one version or another that "Behavioral economics increases the explanatory power of economics by providing it with more realistic psychological foundations" (Camerer and Loewenstein, 2004, p.3). This definition conceals a complicated relationship between economics and psychology that goes back at least to the eighteenth century. In addition, it suggests that economics and psychology are stable, universal entities. But also the label of behavioral economics itself seems odd. If economics deals with the behavior of individuals in the economy, 'behavioral economics' seems a confusing pleonasm. If on the other hand one argues that economics by definition deals with structures and institutions superseding and independent of theories of human behavior, 'behavioral economics' seems oxymoronic. In any case, it calls for some explanation.