This article examines the changing conception of the economic decision-maker as a history of ideas. It traces a six-stage transformation from the rational economic actor constructed in nineteenth-century economic thought to the contemporary algorithmic agent. The first stage conceptualised economic action as the rational calculation of means in relation to given ends. The second recognised the cognitive and informational limits of individual rationality through Herbert Simon’s concept of bounded rationality. The third explored the distribution of decision-making across organisational structures and specialised functions, while the fourth incorporated systematic biases and heuristics into the analysis of human judgement. The fifth externalised an increasing part of calculation to computational systems, initially as an extension of human decision-making. The sixth concerns the emergence of algorithmic agency, in which computational systems can increasingly select, coordinate and execute actions on the basis of human-defined or inferred objectives. The article argues that this trajectory is not simply a progression towards greater rationality. More fundamentally, it represents a transformation in the locus of economic decision-making, as rationality and agency become increasingly distributed across human actors, organisational structures and computational systems.

Received 31 August 2026. Accepted without revisions 19 October 2026. Published online 15 November 2026

Economic thought, Economic rationality, Homo œconomicus, Bounded rationality, Behavioural economics, Organisational decision-making, Computational decision-making, Algorithmic agency, Artificial intelligence,