Neuroeconomics Is a Fundamentally Multidisciplinary Approach Drawing from Economics, Psychology, and Neuroscience

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Neuroeconomics is a fundamentally multidisciplinary approach drawing from economics, psychology, and neuroscience. Neurobiological approaches can significantly contribute to a better understanding of the cognitive underpinnings of economic decision making, from how people evaluate and anticipate financial gains and losses to how they form beliefs about what other people feel or might do. Reciprocally, the mathematical formalism of economic and finance theories could bring new ways of analyzing the neural computations involved in representing decision variables. Our project adopts such perspective on decision-making, asking how utility and social context jointly determine how we represent value and consequently influence our choices. We expect this initiative to foster a new interface between theory and experimentation, between mathematical models and brain function. In addition, the results of this initiative may provide additional means for diagnosis / measurement of the extent of impairment due to pre-frontal lobe damage and provide patients with new rehabilitation tools to help them lead more normal or successful lives. Prefrontal dysfunction is a crucial component of several mental conditions, such as schizophrenia, and drug addiction. The mechanistic level of explanation we believe we could achieve with our studies may help a finer understanding of the physiology and therefore the pathology of those areas, and from the basic research foundations for a new generation of treatments. Finally, on a more philosophical note, the results of this research in conjunction with other work in this area, may give us greater insight into precisely what it means to be rational - a question which, as the divergence between the prescriptions of game theory and actual play in games suggests, is far from clear. .

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