Recent histories of 20th century economics have emphasized the transformation of demand theory that occurred during the period between early neoclassicism and Arrow-Debreu. This paper examines three contributions to this recent literature - Amadae (2003), Davis (2003), and Giocoli (2003) - and...

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...

It is often argued that the inability of Arrow-Debreu general equilibrium theory to produce an adequate proof of the stability of the Walrasian price adjustment mechanism was one of the program's most significant failures (a failure that is directly related to the infamous...

Uskali Mäki has long argued that realist interpretations of economics do not face a challenge regarding the ontological status of non-observable theoretical entities. He argues that in economics, unlike physics, the theoretical entities are "commonsensibles" – entities familiar from our...

This paper examines the different ways that economists have characterized the empirical content of modern consumer choice theory. There has been general agreement among economists that each stage in the development of the theory – from early neoclassical, to ordinal utility, and on to revealed...