Looking under the hood: Exploring assumptions and finding behavioral economics

Cognitive scarcity is a fundamental economic fact, but the standard maximization assumption abstracts from this fact. Much of behavioral economics can be framed as “exploring the maximization assumption.” By applying the tools of behavioral economics to explore this important assumption, we can learn why presuming maximization works, when it works, even when we know the assumption is not accurately descriptive. We can also learn why theory fails when the assumption does not proximately hold.