NEUROECONOMICS AND DECISION MAKING PROCESS

Neuroeconomics unified the once disparate fields of economics and psychology. The central thesis of the paper is that the development of behavioral economics in important respects parallels the development of cognitive science – Neuroeconomics has inspired more change within economics than within psychology because the most important findings in Neuroeconomics have posed more of a challenge to the standard economic perspective. The single most important source of inspiration for behavioral economists has been behavioral decision research, which can, in turn, be seen as an integration of ideas from cognitive science and economics. Neuroeconomics has primarily challenged the standard economic assumption that decision making is a unitary process – a simple matter of integrated and coherent utility maximization – suggesting instead that it is driven by the interaction between automatic and controlled processes. This paper reviews neuroeconomic research in areas of interest to both economists and psychologists: decision making under risk and uncertainty, intertemporal choice, and social decision making.