Neuroeconomic Foundations of Economic Choice-Recent Advances

摘要

The brain controls human behavior. Economic choice is no exception. Recent studies have shown that experimentally induced variation in neural activity in specific regions of the brain changes people's willingness to pay for goods, renders them more impatient, more selfish, and more willing to violate social norms and cheat their trading partner (Camus et al., 2009; Figner et al., 2010; Rnoch, Pascual-Leone, Meyer, Treyer, and Fehr, 2006; Baumgartner, Knoch, Hotz, Eisenegger, and Fehr, 2011; Ruff, Ugazio, and Fehr, 2011; Knoch, Schneider, Schunk, Hohmann, and Fehr, 2009). These studies use noninvasive brain stimulation techniques such as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), which enable the researcher to exogenously increase or decrease neural activity in specific regions of the cortex before subjects make decisions in experimental tasks that elicit their preferences. Such findings demonstrate that neural activity causally determines economic choices, and they provide motivation for studying the neurobiological and computational mechanisms at work in economic behavior.