Does Behavioral Economics substitute or complement Neoclassical Economics? Rethinking the behavioral revolution from a contextualist approach

Abstract

The rise of Behavioral Economics poses an important question: does it substitute or complement Neoclassical Economics? This article makes an analysis to identify how the substitution-complementarity issue is highly sensitive to the epistemic context. In particular, the paper distinguishes four epistemological contexts: descriptive, explicative, predictive, and prescriptive. The idea that the behavioral substitute the neoclassical approach in descriptive and explicative contexts is defended; however, there is a complementarity in the predictive and prescriptive contexts, where there are some domains in which the neoclassical approach might still work well.