From Utilities to Mental Models: A Critical Survey on Decision Rules and Cognition in Consumer Choice

This work critically discusses a selected body of (mainly experimental) studies on consumer behavior in the light of two general questions. First, can one identify within the vast literature from psychology, marketing, etc., a few stylized facts which might be the grounds of a behavioral theory of consumption parsimonious enough to be useful to economic theorizing, and, at the same time, not in open violation of the evidence on how consumers actually behave? Second, to what extent should such theories be nested into an explicit account of the cognitive processes leading to particular consumption acts?