Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to describe the unique experimental procedures and theoretical issues in behavioral economics, its short history and representative experiments, and to evaluate the contributions of this approach to the experimental analysis of behavior. Behavioral economics, just as economic psychology, started as a collaboration between economics and psychology. It has developed, however, differently from traditional economic psychology because theoretical considerations and predictions from micro-economics were applied directly to the results of animal choice experiments and because several concepts in micro-economics were used as new indices describing behavioral variables. Predictions and concepts deduced from analyses using indifference and supply-demand curves have provided important and new perspectives on various phenomena of choice behavior, the matching law, response deprivation theory, economic properties of experimental environment, and so on. It is suggested that the principles of equilibrium and optimization should be examined from the framework of behavior analysis through an integration with behavioral ecology, behavior pharmacology, and experimental economics.
