Economic psychology: Selected contributions to an emerging discipline.

Economic psychology studies the fundamentals of perception and understanding of economic phenomena, economic thought and behaviour. It is an interdisciplinary field of research, strongly overlapping with behavioural economics. Scholars in the field laid the foundations more than a century ago, studying work and organizational behaviour, consumer decision making and selected topics of public economics. Today, economic psychology deals with cognitive dynamics and decision making in general, lay theories of economics, marketing and consumer behaviour, household financial decisions, labour markets, entrepreneurship, work and unemployment, shadow economy and tax behaviour, and wealth and wellbeing. Focusing on the cognitive drivers of decision making, economic psychology also considers emotions related to economic behaviour, such as greed and envy, fear and anger, and positive feelings, such as satisfaction and well-being. We have selected contributions to these topics and provide in the introduction a short overview of the history of economic psychology. The selected papers are briefly introduced, emphasizing future directions of research and potential contributions to contemporary societal challenges.