The theory of consumer choice fills the opening chapters of any micro-economic textbook. Yet, surprisingly, this position of privilege has not translated into a flourishing of economic research that is comparable to what has happened in other branches of economic reasoning.
Starting with Menger, the Austrian economic tradition has always shifted the focus of attention from the problem of equilibrium to that of social order, to the evolution of norms, institutions and practices that favor social cooperation and coordination. Within this tradition competition and markets are not viewed as states, but as processes in which change and errors occur and efficiency is reached but also easily lost. The real economic problem becomes a problem of knowledge – how it is discovered, how it is transmitted. Consumers’ interactions and choices and actual consumption practices play an important role in these evolving forms of sociality. And it is within this framework, that allows for experimentation and learning, that they should be studied.

Advances in Austrian Economics is now available online at ScienceDirect — full-text online of volumes 2 onwards.

*Part of the Advances in Austrian Economics series
*A collection of high-level papers on the evolution of consumption
*International in scope