One Sentence at a Time: A Quantitative History of Rationality in Economic Thought

Thomas Delcey (), Aurélien Goutsmedt () and Alexandre Truc ()
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Thomas Delcey: LEDi - Laboratoire d'Economie de Dijon [Dijon] - UBE - Université Bourgogne Europe
Aurélien Goutsmedt: ICHEC - Brussels Management School [Bruxelles], UCLouvain - Université Catholique de Louvain = Catholic University of Louvain
Alexandre Truc: GREDEG - Groupe de Recherche en Droit, Economie et Gestion - UNS - Université Nice Sophia Antipolis (1965 - 2019) - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique - UniCA - Université Côte d'Azur

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Abstract: This article demonstrates how unsupervised quantitative methods can enrich the history of economic thought. Using the largest English-language corpus ever assembled for the field—nearly 260,000 economics journal articles from 1900 to 2009 with citation data—we analyze the evolution of the concept of rationality. Combining large language model–based semantic analysis with bibliometric and network methods, we identify and cluster discussions of rationality across time and scales, such as the emergence of a social view of rationality, the circulation of bounded rationality, and the emergence of behavioral economics. We provide an open-source interactive tool to support transparency and reuse.

Keywords: Text mining; large language models; natural language processing; behavioral economics; bibliometrics; economics history; Bounded rationality; rationality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo, nep-his and nep-hpe
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-05431080v2
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Published in European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2026, 33 (4), pp.835-887. ⟨10.1080/09672567.2026.2698470⟩

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-05431080

DOI: 10.1080/09672567.2026.2698470

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