[dalbasal]

What he's describing a marketing model moreso than an economic one. This a theme with behavioural economics. I doubt they'll find one.

The "homo economicus" model has become somewhat of a straw man for behavioural economics to disprove. Realistically the model was never claimed to apply in the types of domains where it's being disproved.

Consumers of the modern world are bombarded with choices and attempts to influence these choices. That's not a world, IMO, that can be "modelled" in the same way that a medieval village can be modelled.

If the discipline must be scientific, maybe the better model is "engineering science" where you have to try and build the thing in order to study it. Computation may exist, in various forms, in nature. But, the way to do computer science isn't observing nature. It's building computers, at least on paper.