Social Economics : A Brief Introduction to the Handbook This chapter provides an introduction to social economics the study with the methods of economics of social phenomena in which aggregates affect individual choices. Such phenomena include social norms and conventions cultural identities and stereotypes peer and neighborhood effects etcetera. The aim is to illustrate the intellectual vitality and richness of the recent literature in social economics by organizing its main contributions in a series of surveys. Social economics for instance does not lend itself naturally to a classic distinction along the theory empirical work line as concepts and measurements are often developed in tight connection with each other. Traditionally economists have considered preferences as exogenous parameters for the study of individual choice. These self imposed constraints have traditionally limited the scope of economic theory outside of purely economic phenomena such as markets. A different approach to the study of the endogenous formation of preferences is to characterize those systems of preferences that are stable under some specific dynamic selection mechanism. Economists have traditionally studied externalities as well as strategic interactions that is environments in which the actions of some agents affect either the set of feasible actions available to other agents or their preferences.