Robert Sugden, FBA (born 26 August 1949) is an English author in the area of cognitive and behavioural economics.
In his most cited work, Sugden explored how conventions of property, mutual aid, and voluntary supply of public goods can evolve spontaneously out of the interactions of self-interested individuals and can become moral norms.
[1] Sugden investigated a number of violations of the von Neumann and Morgenstern's expected utility axioms, and developed regret theory as an alternative with Graham Loomes.
In support of this work, he developed a number of experimental methods to test theories of decision under risk.
[3] In The Community of Advantage, Sugden develops a contractarian approach to welfare economics that is based on opportunity sets and not individual preferences.