The relevance of studying the problems of economic behavior of the population is due not only to the recognition of the leading role of the human factor in ensuring the growth of national wealth, but also to the active use of theoretical and applied developments of numerous studies on this topic in real economic practice – in the work of the World Bank, in developed and developing countries when they carry out socio-economic policy. It is worth mentioning some of the Nobel prize winners in economics: American economist G.S. Becker – “for the extension of the sphere of economic analysis to a number of aspects of human behavior and interaction, including non-market behavior” (1992), Anglo-American economist A. Deaton – “for the analysis of problems of consumption, poverty and social security” (2015), and Chicago Professor R. Thaler – “for his contribution to the study of behavioral economics” (2017). The subject of the study in the present article is the understanding and clarification of the definition of the category “economic behavior of the population” used in economic research. It is emphasized that the spread of interdisciplinary synthesis has led to the blurring of the concept of the category under consideration, the emergence of interpretations that are different in essence and content. The goal of the article is to substantiate the author's approach to the understanding of the category “economic behavior of the population”, which corresponds to the neoclassical paradigm of economic science. General scientific methods (analysis, synthesis, comparison, generalization) were used in the study. We systematized theoretical ideas about the essence of economic behavior of the population and human models used as a tool for the study of this phenomenon; identified the main approaches to the study of economic behavior, highlighted their features; considered the main component of behavior – rationality. A distinctive feature of our study is its departure from the interdisciplinary synthesis in the understanding of the economic behavior of the population and an appeal to purely economic definition of this category, which is consistent with the prevailing economics in the neoclassical tradition and allows taking into account the key aspects of behavior, to exclude “non-economic” variables (emotions, moods, traditions, and other external factors) and to create a descriptive or mathematical model of behavior suitable for the analysis and forecasting. The obtained results can be used to substantiate the theoretical and methodological foundations in the course of studies of economic behavior of the population
Keywords
economic theory, economic behavior, interdisciplinary synthesis, model of human, rationality