Abstract
Study objective: Within behavior analysis, behavioral economics was formed from 4 research streams: the ecological approach to feeding behavior, traditional economic psychological research on and economic analyses of token economies, the pursuit of quantitative definitions for the relativity of reinforcement, and extended studies on the matching law. Behavioral economics had 3 important products: new indices for the efficacy of reinforcers, procedural and theoretical distinctions among experimental conditions, and an optimal theory of choice behavior. This last, most influential result promoted teleological behaviorism as an alternative to radical and theoretical behaviorism. However, it also inherited 2 problems from economics: bounded rationality and uncertainty. Experimental economics and evolutionary economics are 2 candidates that may overcome these problems. These fields have made use of a game-analytic approach for their experimental and theoretical framework. Evolutionary economics is an especially attractive research field for behavior analysis because it can provide an evolutionary game, including an idea of bounded rationality, as a new simulation tool for choice behavior and various concepts of the evolutionary process which are different from a biological framework.
