The Disciplinary Mobility of Core Behavioral Economists[La mobilité disciplinaire des chercheurs au cœur de l’économie comportementale]

Disciplinary mobility occurs when researchers publish outside their disciplines of origin. It is an important mechanism of interdisciplinarity and knowledge transfer. Behavioral economics (BE) was founded by two psychologists, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, who used disciplinary mobility to influence economics. In this article, we study the disciplinary mobility of eight core behavioral economists to better understand how it has influenced the early development of BE and the interdisciplinary practices of later behavioral economists. Besides the movement of psychologists toward the core of economics, we identify an outward movement of economists away from the discipline. This movement away from economics has allowed some behavioral economists to escape some of the normative traditions of economics while establishing new forms of scientific legitimacy for economists. This has enabled them to push the frontiers of economics and promote a more radical approach to BE at the cost of an increasingly weaker relationship with the core concerns of economics.