Overconsumption Society through the Looking-glass of Behavioral Economics

The academic literature concerned with consumerism and overconsumption society is mainly dominated either by the principles of free choice under a capitalist economy or by the more humanistic language of consumer culture. Both perspectives bring to the table interesting arguments but there are so polarized that the final image of the discourse is still confuse and inconclusive.The purpose of this paper is to define a behavioral approach of the consumption society that aims to surpass the existing framework of consumerism and to decompose the phenomena departing from the bounded rationality of individuals and the way it is transferred into their consumption patterns.