Economics Commons^™

Identity, John B. Davis

Economics Faculty Research and Publications

The concept of identity has begun to be employed only relatively recently in economics, and accordingly still lacks a standard meaning and established set of applications in the subject. However, in its most influential initial uses by Amartya Sen (1999) and George Akerlof and Rachel Kranton (2000) it has been developed largely in terms of the concept of social identity (though in quite different ways). Social identity as understood in social psychology (see Brown, 2000), where the concept was influentially developed by Erik Erikson in connection with his idea of an identity crisis (Erikson, 1950), concerns individuals’ ‘identification with’ social …