Model Of Homo Economicus And The Concept Of Ultimately Desirable

The model known as “Homo economicus†is currently the most widespread and widely-used model of human behavior in economics. The first part of this paper will try to give a short summary of the basic assumptions of the model which have shown themselves to be controversial over the centuries of it's development, increasingly so over the past few decades. The second part of this paper is concerned with introducing the concept of “Ultimately Desirable†, whose purpose is twofold. Firstly, it will be argued that this concept elaborates on a theoretical level the limitations of the Homo economicus model, which have lately been very clearly demonstrated empirically by the work of behavioural economists. Secondly it is proposed that the concept of the Ultimately Desirable can be used not only as a tool for explaining limitations, but even more widely as a general theoretical framework on which future economic analysis could rely.