Faster computers allowed the creation of models that incorporated differences in behavior. The Nobel committee cited Professor Deaton’s work around 1980 in modeling demand for individual goods, which was both some of the earliest work in that vein and a model that remains in wide use.

In continuing his research, he found that rising incomes tend to improve calorie intake for the poorest families, but the effect diminishes at higher income levels. Aggregate statistics, as a result, obscured the benefits of income gains for very poor families.

“What he’s shown is that you do learn a great deal more by looking at the behavior that underlies the aggregates,” said Duncan Thomas, an economist at Duke University and another former student.

Professor Thomas said he also admired Professor Deaton’s clarity. “He will bring evidence to the table in a way that makes you say, ‘Well, of course that has to be right,’ ” Professor Thomas said.

Professor Deaton said he hoped “carefulness in measurement” would be his legacy. He said his mentor, Richard Stone, a Cambridge professor who won the Nobel in economics in 1984, had ingrained in him the importance of good data. “I’ve always wanted to be like him,” Professor Deaton said. “I think putting numbers together into a coherent framework always seemed to me to be what really matters.”

His work also is marked by an insistence that theories must explain these more complicated sets of facts. “A good theoretical account must explain all of the evidence that we see,” Professor Deaton wrote in a 2011 essay on his life in economics. “If it doesn’t work everywhere, we have no idea what we are talking about, and all is chaos.”