Economic psychology is the study of phenomena common to the disciplines of economics and psychology. Perhaps because economic psychology has such a potentially enormous and rather poorly defined domain, while the term is frequently used in Europe, it is not much used in the United States. In the United States, the subject area exists. Indeed, it is flourishing. However, the study is embraced by the slightly narrower overlapping areas of judgment and decision making, behavioral economics, and consumer research. Industrial and organizational psychology, which mainly studies psychological processes in the employee, is frequently taken as outside the area, although there are a number of common threads.

The disciplines of economics and psychology overlap in a host of different ways, but economic psychology has mostly been concerned ...