Economists’ allergy to asking people things directly comes from their fear that people will say things that don’t reflect their true information/motives. Introspection is not entirely accurate, even if accurate may lead to embarrassing conclusions, and even if accurate and not embarrassing requires effort to conduct and communicate. Economists like to observe peoples’ behavior under changing incentives and constraints. Even the heterodox behavioral economists focus much more on what people do than on what they say they do.

Grant is right that this allergy leaves a lot of running room for anthropologists to make a contribution. Sometimes what people say is really helpful in understanding their decision process. And sometimes, where hard-to-objectively measure factors such as meaning are involved, only a cultural analysis can put meat on the economists’ analytical skeleton.

-Steve (lazycomic.blogspot.com)

I have probably said this before on your blog: I believe marketing exists to the extent that the assumptions of neoclassical (textbook) economics are false. People and companies are not individual utility maximizers; they are not even would-be individual utility maximizers; they discount future events in a manner inconsistent with (neoclassical) economic theory; they do not have perfect knowledge, not even about the past; they do not have unlimited information processing powers or memories; nor are there even such things as commodities.

Of course, the standard defence of these assumptions is that in modeling economic phenomena we have to start somewhere. There are two responses to this claim: First, why here, when these assumptions are so obviously false? And second, how do we know we can get from these absurd assumptions to somewhere close to where we want to be, where the assumptions are more realistic? We can only do that if the relationship between the underlying phenomena and our model of it is continuous; in other words, if it is the case that a small change in our assumptions still keeps our model close to the phenomena we are modeling. Every business and marketing experience, and every statistical instinct I have, tells me this is not the case with markets.

Marketplaces are complex, adaptive, reflective systems, not machines; and models of markets need to use metaphors from biology and complex systems, rather than on 19th century mechanics.

Of course, the real answer to “Why here?” is because these unrealistic assumptions make the math easier. When economics ceases to be a discipline which puts mathematical tractability ahead of insight into human motivation and behaviour they might get somewhere.