Abstract
Recent years have seen important new explorations along the boundaries between economics and psychology. For the economist, the immediate question about these developments is whether they include new advances in psychology that can fruitfully be applied to economics. But the psychologist will also raise the converse question—whether there are developments in economic theory and observation that have implications for the central core of psychology. If economics is able to find verifiable and verified generalisations about human economic behaviour, then these generalisations must have a place in the more general theories of human behaviour to which psychology and sociology aspire. Influence will run both ways.2
The author is Professor of Administration at the Carnegie Institute of Technology. This paper draws heavily upon earlier investigations with his colleagues in the Graduate School of Industrial Administration, carried out in library, field and laboratory, under several grants from the Ford Foundation for research on organisations. He is especially indebted to Julian Feldman, whose wide-ranging exploration of the so-called binary choice experiment [25] has provided an insightful set of examples of alternative approaches to a specific problem of choice. For bibliographical references see pp. 26–28.
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© 1966 The Royal Economic Society and the American Economic Association
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Simon, H.A. (1966). Theories of Decision-Making in Economics and Behavioural Science. In: Surveys of Economic Theory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-00210-8_1
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