For a smart person.  If we can find one we could suggest it to them.

I see a PhD topic…

I’m merely suggesting that more explicit modeling of habit formation is a good way forward – that would tie together a lot of disparate literature in economics.

Even if we viewed habit strictly as a preference, saying that we should focus strongly at looking at one particular preference that is of great importance is very different to saying “lets model all the preferences”. … it is like admitting that the shift in some curves when we look at a market may in fact be of more consequence than the movements along the curves we focus on.

On that slight side note – this is my current opinion about endogenous money people, they are talking about the importance of some shifts in curves in the credit market, and how to identify them.  If they communicated it in that way, they would find themselves well inside the mainstream.  So I don’t think it hurts us to pick things that are important and focus heavily on them 😉

If I understand you correctly you’re saying “Economists should endogenously model preference formation.” Well, yes, that would be nice and there’s probably a Nobel prize waiting for whoever manages to find a convincing way of doing it.

“I think you’re drawing a false dichotomy between modelling it as a preference and choosing to form a habit.”

I would say that it is a matter of what is done – it is currently modeled as an exogenous process, or the endogenous process that generates it is arbitrary.

Now when we solve models that include habitual behaviour in consumption, our agents solve forward and take this into account – that is cool.  But given that this forms part of what an agent is choosing to do, there is definitely a role to more accurately describing the process of habit formation … as the shape of this process will change the solution that our agents choose.

“I don’t think Lucas was asking macroeconomists to explicitly model preference formation”

No, but the reason it might be nice to have a firmer theory on the process of habit formation is that it allows us to model structural changes in the development of habits.