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Behaviorist psychology has increasingly used economic concepts and vocabulary since the 1960’s. The emergence of behavioral economics in the 1980’s seems to show that economics and behavioral sciences share common objects from now on. Yet crossing over disciplinary boundaries has raised important difficulties. This article proposes a history of the economic transformation of behaviorism. It focuses particularly on the alleged equivalence between the behavioral concept of “reward” and the economic notion of “utility”. Incomplete overlapping between the two disciplines explains current theoretical problems of behavioral economics.