Introduction

Many economists would agree that as a social science economics aims to explain cause-and-effect relationships in economic life, and aims to do so in close conjunction with an analysis of agency. Yet though economists constantly refer to economic agents when they speak of individuals making choices, the concept of agency itself is not sharply defined in economics. I define agency as the power to initiate and bring about events. Economic agents, then, have the power to initiate economic activity, and, together with other causal factors, such as capital, institutional arrangements, natural resources, etc., help bring about events seen as the causal effects of their actions. Choice, economists' main concern, is thus an aspect of agency in that its analysis helps us account for how economic agents act on the world. But choice needs to be understood in a wider framework of cause-and-effect explanation if economic agents are to be understood specifically as agents with powers to initiate and bring about events when making choices.

Another way of seeing economic agents as agents in a causal sense is to recognize that on this conception economic agents actually exist, and that adopting a cause-and-effect view of economic agents commits one to an ontological realism about economic agents in the sense distinguished by Mäki in his taxonomy of realisms (1992). Note that while most economists would say they are interested in actually existing economic agents, many would also allow that the logic of choice – or how agents ought to behave – may be evaluated apart from the question of whether there are agents whose choice behavior that logic describes (Sugden 1991, p. 752).