Economics, Psychology and the History of Consumer Choice Theory

This paper examines elements of the complex place/role/influence of psychology in the history of consumer choice theory. The paper reviews, and then challenges, the standard narrative that psychology was "in" consumer choice theory early in the neoclassical revolution, then strictly "out" during the ordinal and revealed preference revolutions, now (possibly) back in with recent developments in experimental, behavioral, and neuroeconomics. The paper uses the work of particular economic theorists to challenge this standard narrative and then provides an alternative interpretation of the relationship between psychology and consumer choice theory. It concludes by discussing some of the implications of this complex history