Arquitectura de decisiones y paternalismo libertario: hacia una microeconomía empíricamente fundamentada[Decision architecture and libertarian paternalism: towards an empirically based microeconomics]

One of the most important debates in the philosophy of economic science refers to the disjunctive between instrumentalism and realism. Nudge, by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, represents a milestone in the development, and possibly the consolidation, of a new realist paradigm - of an empirically-based microeconomics, as the one Herbert Simon demanded - which might displace the instrumentalist paradigm that has predominated over more than a century as the theoretical foundation of political economy. Thaler and Sunstein manage to, firstly, condense a complex characterization of economic agents, based on the empirical findings that cognitive psychology and behavioral economics have been achieving over the last thirty years; and, secondly, they manage to articulate such positive characterization of economic agents to a normative proposal on public policy and institucional design.