Economic Behavior –Evolutionary vs. Behavioral Perspectives

An evolutionary perspective on economic behavior has to account for the influences that thehuman genetic endowment has on the choices the agents make. Likely to have been fixed intimes of fierce selection pressure, this endowment is presumably adapted to the livingconditions of early humans. If at all, behavioral economics accounts for its influences oneconomic decision making in a way similar to the approach taken by evolutionary psychology,i.e. by focusing on decision heuristics and their tensions with modern rationality standards.In an evolutionary perspective, that focus needs to be extended so as to also embrace themotivational underpinnings of economic behavior. In the language of economics this meansto inquire into the agents’ preferences and to explain how they relate to the human geneticendowment and how they change over time. The paper discusses several implications of suchan extension.