IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-03402768.html

Forty Years of Behavioral Economics

Author

Listed:
  • Alexandre Truc

    (UniCA - Université Côte d'Azur, GREDEG - Groupe de Recherche en Droit, Economie et Gestion - UNS - Université Nice Sophia Antipolis (1965 - 2019) - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - UniCA - Université Côte d'Azur, CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

The present article offers the first quantitative history of behavioural economics (BE) from the 1970s to the 2010s. We document the foundation of the field by Kahneman and Tversky in the 1980s and 1990s; the separation of experimental market economics and BE in the 1990s; the decreasing importance of psychology in the 1990s onward; and the rise of European authors after the 2000s. Overall, we show that after the 1990s, BE transformed from a unified American research program with a clearly identifiable core, to a multipolar and international research program with relatively independent subspecialties. Despite claims that BE is mostly an empirical venture, we show that the field is heavily structured by theoretical contributions. A handful of seminal models capture most of the citations in the field and explain how the subspecialties in BE emerged, stabilised, and became more autonomous from the historical core.
(This abstract was borrowed from another version of this item.)

Suggested Citation

  • Alexandre Truc, 2021. "Forty Years of Behavioral Economics," Post-Print hal-03402768, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03402768
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a
    for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Dorian Jullien & Alexandre Truc, 2024. "Towards a history of behavioural and experimental economics in France," The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 31(6), pages 998-1033, November.
    2. Schuster, Amy M. & Agrawal, Shubham & Britt, Noah & Sperry, Danielle & Van Fossen, Jenna A. & Wang, Sicheng & Mack, Elizabeth A. & Liberman, Jessica & Cotten, Shelia R., 2023. "Will automated vehicles solve the truck driver shortages? Perspectives from the trucking industry," Technology in Society, Elsevier, vol. 74(C).
    3. Alexandre Truc, 2022. "Neuroeconomics Hype or Hope? An Answer," GREDEG Working Papers 2022-26, Groupe de REcherche en Droit, Economie, Gestion (GREDEG CNRS), Université Côte d'Azur, France.
    4. Lorenzo Esposito & Letizia Malara, 2023. "Cognitive biases and historical turns. An empirical assessment of the intersections between minds and events in the investors’ decisions," DISCE - Working Papers del Dipartimento di Politica Economica dipe0029, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Dipartimenti e Istituti di Scienze Economiche (DISCE).
    5. Drakopoulos, Stavros A. & Katselidis, Ioannis, 2026. "The Role of Psychology in the Post War II Non-Mainstream tradition: George Katona, Harvey Leibenstein, and Tibor Scitovsky," MPRA Paper 129729, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    6. Jean-Sébastien Lenfant, 2024. "The Lichtenstein-Slovic-Tversky-Kahneman Nexus. A Prehistory of Behavioral Economics (1969-1974)," GREDEG Working Papers 2024-31, Groupe de REcherche en Droit, Economie, Gestion (GREDEG CNRS), Université Côte d'Azur, France.
    7. Alexandre Truc, 2025. "An historical definition of behavioural economics: old/new behavioural economics and its relationship to experimental economics," Post-Print hal-05543096, HAL.
    8. Panagiotis Karadimas, 2025. "The act of voting: Another challenge for behavioural economics," Economic Affairs, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 45(2), pages 277-288, June.
    9. Alexandre Truc, 2022. "The Disciplinary Mobility of Core Behavioral Economists," GREDEG Working Papers 2022-27, Groupe de REcherche en Droit, Economie, Gestion (GREDEG CNRS), Université Côte d'Azur, France.
    10. Gunessee, Saileshsingh & Lane, Tom, 2023. "Changing perceptions about experimentation in economics: 50 years of evidence from principles textbooks," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 107(C).
    11. Muriel Dal-Pont Legrand & Alexandre Truc, 2022. "Agent-Based Models: impact and interdisciplinary influences in economics," Working Papers halshs-04832295, HAL.
    12. Guilhem Lecouteux, 2023. "The Homer economicus narrative: from cognitive psychology to individual public policies," Journal of Economic Methodology, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 30(2), pages 176-187, April.
    13. Maxime MERLI & Antoine PARENT, 2022. "Portfolio Diversification During the Belle Époque: When the Actual Portfolios of French Individual Investors Met Behavioral Finance," Working Papers of LaRGE Research Center 2022-01, Laboratoire de Recherche en Gestion et Economie (LaRGE), Université de Strasbourg.
    14. Guilhem Lecouteux, 2022. "The Homer economicus narrative: from cognitive psychology to individual public policies," Working Papers hal-03791951, HAL.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03402768. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.