ABSTRACT
A recurring theme in the history of economic thought is the idea that individuals are sometimes better viewed as collections of subpersonal agents, each with its own interests or goals. The modeling of persons as collections of agents has proved to be a useful heuristic for investigating aberrant choice-behaviors, such as weakness of will, procrastination, addiction, and other decision anomalies that indicate internal or motivational conflict. Yet, the concepts and methods used to study subpersonal agents give rise to a frenzied and sometimes confusing picture about who or what economic agents are, if not individual persons. In an attempt to clarify this picture, this chapter investigates how the concept of the economic agent has changed following the subpersonal turn in behavioral economics and neuroeconomics.
