The World the Marketers Made: Choice Architects and the Business Origins of Behavioral Economics, 1960-2000

Eli Cook is a historian of U.S. Capitalism and Associate Professor of History at Haifa University

Jan Logemann is business and economic historian focusing on modern Germany and the U.S. He is Privatozent at Göttingen University and Senior Lecture on Northamerican Economomics at Bonn University. 2nd Homepage at University Goettingen

Making Choice Comparable: Marketing Devices, Commensuration, and the Scientization of Behavior

This project examines how consumer choice has been rendered as a comparable and actionable object of knowledge across marketing and economics. Rather than treating behavioral economics as a self-contained theoretical or methodological development, the project investigates the role of marketing in producing the devices, metrics, and formats through which heterogeneous consumer responses are made commensurable. Focusing on business school marketing departments, research institutes, academic journals, and trade venues, the project traces how practices such as segmentation, experimental testing, and demand measurement have been developed, standardized, and circulated across academic and commercial settings as part of the scientization of behavioral claims. These practices are approached as commensuration devices: socio-material arrangements that transform context-dependent behaviors into comparable units that support evaluation, decision-making, and organizational governance. Conceptually, the project develops the notion of commensurating choice to capture the work required to stabilize and maintain such comparability. In doing so, it explores how the authority of behavioral knowledge rests not only on theoretical claims or empirical findings, but also on the institutionalization of devices that render choice measurable, transportable, and defensible as “scientific” across contexts. By foregrounding the role of marketing and business schools in these processes, the project contributes to research on valuation, the social studies of economics, and the organizational production of knowledge.

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The Business Origin and Professionalization of Behavioral Marketing in Advertising and Retailing in Colombia, 1970-1990

Mass consumption and retailing in Colombia, similar to other countries in Latin America has remained largely concentrated towards urban middle- and upper-class consumers. Nonetheless, businesses in Colombia’s metropolitan areas have participated in the globalization of business and marketing education, which can also be seen in its path towards institutionalizing consumer behavioral studies. By reconstructing the trajectories of marketing professors and practitioners, often found in the same person, this project aims to investigate the introduction and development of behavior economic approaches in marketing and retail advertising in Colombia. It focuses on the role of marketing practitioners as “choice architects” in retailing, the professionalization of behavioral economic approaches in retail marketing and the circulation and local adaption of the ideas through business schools as well as multinational advertising agencies and businesses. The goal is to examine where new forms of behavioral marketing expertise emerged, how they were applied in retailing and how the developments were shaped by the region’s shifting political economic frameworks, transnational tendencies and adapted to local consumer cultures.

The World Filene Made: Examining the Early Business Origins of Choice Architecture

The origin story of choice architecture and the business origins of behavioral economics traces back to the turn of the 20th century when America was being transformed into a nation of consumers, at the time of the rise of corporate liberalism. Bargain basements were one example of combining efficient use of store space with means to entice different classes to shop. None was more famous or successful than Filene’s from Boston. (Leach, 1993). This research article will analyze Filene’s ‘automatic’ bargain basement, Model Stock Plan and approach towards advertising, as expressions of his positive attitude towards the consumer while still manipulating their environment to further an economy based on mass production, mass distribution and mass consumption.

How "Girl Math" Became a Shared Logic: A Behavioral Economics Perspective on a Digital Phenomenon

In 2023, a seemingly trivial trend emerged on social media under the name "girl math". Circulating primarily among Gen Z and millennial women, it articulated shared logics of consumption, forms of mental accounting that framed spending as justified, reduced, or even non-existent. While easily dismissed as humorous or short-lived, this language of calculation points to deeper structures shaping how young women understand and negotiate economic life.
This research approaches "girl math" as an entry point into broader questions of behavioral economics and its hold on our everyday lives. It situates these practices within the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the rise of social media as a space of normative consumption, and gendered patterns of justification and guilt around spending, while also considering how these logics operate across different socio-economic contexts.
Instead of dismissing what may seem like a passing TikTok trend, this research seeks to understand how and why young women think and act about money the way they do.