Model Transfer in the Recent History of Economics: The Case of Rational Choice Models

Abstract By the second half of the twentieth century, rational choice models—formal frameworks representing decision-making through quantified preferences, utilities, and probabilistic expectations—had risen to unprecedented prominence. These models became central not only to social and behavioral scientific inquiry but also influenced a broad array of rather unrelated fields such as philosophy, psychology, computer science, and biology. Yet as their reach expanded, so too did skepticism among scientists about modeling individuals as rational actors, quantifying human behavior, and modeling non-human entities as rational decision makers. This development—that I refer to as the “rational choice phenomenon”—raises a central question: how did these mathematically driven, extensively disputed models of human behavior gain such wide scientific traction? Focusing on the case of economics, I argue that the appeal of rational choice models lay not merely in their flexibility and capacity to quantify human choice for the purposes of formal analysis and modeling. Their extensive transfer was also shaped by a historically contingent constellation of non-epistemic factors—social, institutional, and political—that enabled their adoption across disciplinary boundaries.