What Daniel Kahneman thought about economics: A reconstruction and critique

Starmer, Chris and Sugden, Robert (2025) What Daniel Kahneman thought about economics: A reconstruction and critique. Environmental and Resource Economics. ISSN 0924-6460

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Abstract

Drawing on Kahneman’s writings, his responses in interviews and our personal recollections, we reconstruct and critically assess his view of his contributions to behavioural economics, of developments in economics that have built on those contributions, and of earlier related work by economists. Kahneman always insisted that he was a psychologist, pure and simple. He saw his primary research programme as the study of intuitive judgement. While he believed that outputs from this programme could be usefully applied in economics, he differentiated his programme from most work in behavioural economics, including that of economists such as Allais and Markowitz who had proposed alternatives to expected utility theory from the 1950s. He saw behavioural economics as distinct from his approach because it retained the fundamental maximising structure of rational choice theory and represented psychological effects in ‘one deviation at a time’ models. We argue that the two programmes have more in common than Kahneman thought, and that their respective methodologies are complementary and mutually informative. As used by many behaviourally-inclined economists, utility maximisation is a flexible modelling strategy for representing considerations that might enter a reasonable person’s decision making, rather than a commitment to the belief that individuals act on preferences that satisfy a priori axioms of normative rationality. The research method of considering one deviation at a time is used in both modelling and experimentation and in both economics and psychology, in ways that promote cumulative advances in scientific knowledge.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information:	Data Availability: The paper reviews and comments on work that has been published and is cited in the references. No other data is necessary to interpret, replicate or build on the findings reported.
Uncontrolled Keywords:	daniel kahneman,behavioural economics,methodology of economics,methodology of psychology,economics, econometrics and finance(all),3*,this is a reconstruction and critique of the methodology of daniel kahneman, the only psychologist to have won the economics nobel prize and a founding father of behavioural economics. as pioneers of behavioural economics, long-standing associates of kahneman and established methodologists of economics, we are well qualified to comment on kahneman's work. ,/dk/atira/pure/subjectarea/asjc/2000
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Economics
UEA Research Groups:	Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Centres > Centre for Behavioural and Experimental Social Sciences Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Centres > Centre for Competition Policy Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Behavioural Economics Faculty of Social Sciences > Research Groups > Economic Theory
Depositing User:	LivePure Connector
Date Deposited:	16 Jun 2025 11:30
Last Modified:	27 Aug 2025 15:30
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/99559
DOI:	10.1007/s10640-025-01031-8

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