An economic approach to modeling personality

Abstract One of the main interest of economics is to understand how people change their behavior when circumstances change. Recently, economists became interested in personality psychology to better understand the observed heterogeneity in behavior. Insights from personality psychology are used, and most studies are of an empirical nature. However, there is always an implicit economic model in the back. The aim of this chapter is to describe a simple economic model of personality as it would typically be built by economists. We sketch a model of individual behavior that allows us to interpret personality traits from an economic point of view. We construct an explicit economic framework that allows us to further investigate the relationship between personality and behavior.