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It's the biology, stupid! Proxy failures in economic decision making

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 May 2024

Pier Luigi Sacco Open the ORCID record for Pier Luigi Sacco [Opens in a new window]
Pier Luigi Sacco*
Affiliation:
Biobehavioral Arts & Culture for Health, Sustainability & Social Cohesion (BACH) Center, University of Chieti-Pescara Viale Pindaro, Pescara, Italy metaLAB (at) Harvard, Cambridge, MA, USAhttps://www.unich.it/ugov/person/1902 pierluigi_sacco@fas.harvard.edu; https://pierluigisacco.eu
*
Corresponding author: Pier Luigi Sacco; Email: pierluigi.sacco@unich.it
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Abstract

Utilitarian characterizations of economic decision making fail to capture the complex, conditional, and heterogeneous motivations underlying human behavior as shaped by the predictive, multicriterial drivers of biological regulation. Unless economic models start to acknowledge that humans have bodies and a biology with its own adaptive logic and tradeoffs, economic policies will be systematically exposed to, and systematic generators of, proxy failures.

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 47 , 2024 , e82
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press

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