This paper examines the evolutionary fitness of a variety of ways of reaching decisions in early hunter-gatherer societies, in order to derive insights about how economists should view modern consumers. It challenges conclusions reached by mainstream economists Robson, Rayo and Becker about why...

Learning processes are widely held to be the mechanism by which boundedly rational agents adapt to environmental changes. We argue that this same outcome might also be achieved by a different mechanism, namely specialisation and the division of knowledge, which we here extend to the consumer...

This paper begins by exploring four different possible forms of relationship between economics and psychology, which have different connotations in terms of the relative status of the two disciplines. It then focuses on the future for one of these, psychological economics. After setting out the...