Abstract

George Katona was a founder of behavioral economics. Katona first published a broad outline and agenda for the development of behavioral economics in the 1940s (1942a, 1944a, 1945, 1946a, 1946b, 1947, 1951a, 1951b). Katona conceived behavioral economics as a discipline within economics that was primary concerned with the human element in economic affairs. While some believe that the adjective “behavioral” is implicit and unnecessary in the title of any social science discipline, Katona thought it was necessary to emphasize that the centerpiece of this research was human decision making whereas a significant portion of economic theory was concerned with the behavior of markets. Katona did not attempt to replace economic theory but tried to bolster its findings with new insights from a more complete and accurate account of economic behavior (Katona, 1951a, 1963, 1967a, 1972a, 1974, 1976a, 1980). Katona was an empirical scientist who believed that understanding economic behavior through careful observation was the best foundation on which to base advances in economic theory. That same approach has persisted for most other researchers in behavioral economics who have followed Katona (Rabin, 2002).