Neuroeconomics

This paper will consider the relationship between complexity economics and behavioral economics. A crucial key to this is to understand that Herbert Simon was both the founder of explicitly modern behavioral economics as well as one of the early developers of complexity theory. Bounded rationality was essentially derived from Simon's view of the impossibility of full rationality on the part of economic agents. Modern complexity theory through such approaches as agent-based modeling offers an approach to understanding behavioral economics by allowing for specific behavioral responses to be assigned to agents who interact within this context, even without full rationality...

OBJECTIVE: Suicide among adolescents is a major public health problem. Decision-making deficits may play an important role in vulnerability to suicidal behavior, but few studies have examined decision-making performance in youth at risk for suicide. In this study, we seek to extend recent findings that adolescent suicide attempters process risk evaluations differently than adolescents who have not attempted suicide. METHODS: We assessed decision-making in 14 adolescent suicide attempters and 14 non-attempter comparison subjects, ages 15-19, using the Cambridge Gambling Task (CGT)...

Neuroeconomics is the study of the neurobiological and computational basis of value-based decision making. Its goal is to provide a biologically based account of human behaviour that can be applied in both the natural and the social sciences. This Review proposes a framework to investigate different aspects of the neurobiology of decision making. The framework allows us to bring together recent findings in the field, highlight some of the most important outstanding problems, define a common lexicon that bridges the different disciplines that inform neuroeconomics, and point the way to future applications...

Reward seeking is controlled by conditioned stimuli (CSs). There is a positive relation between mesocorticolimbic dopamine (DA) and the performance of learned reward-directed behavior. The mechanisms by which reward-, including drug-, associated stimuli come to acquire the capacity to activate the DA systems are not fully understood. In this review, we discuss the possible neurochemical mechanisms within the ventral tegmental area that may be involved in how CSs acquire the capacity to activate ventral tegmental area (VTA) DA neurons based on principles of long-term potentiation in the VTA and the role of mesocorticolimbic DA in reward-related learning...

Electrophysiological studies in monkeys have shown that dopaminergic neurons respond to the reward prediction error. In addition, striatal neurons alter their responsiveness to cortical or thalamic inputs in response to the dopamine signal, via the mechanism of dopamine-regulated synaptic plasticity. These findings have led to the hypothesis that the striatum exhibits synaptic plasticity under the influence of the reward prediction error and conduct reinforcement learning throughout the basal ganglia circuits...

For decades, the dominant paradigm for studying decision making--the expected utility framework--has been burdened by an increasing number of empirical findings that question its validity as a model of human cognition and behavior. However, as Kuhn (1962) argued in his seminal discussion of paradigm shifts, an old paradigm cannot be abandoned until a new paradigm emerges to replace it. In this article, we argue that the recent shift in researcher attention toward basic cognitive processes that give rise to decision phenomena constitutes the beginning of that replacement paradigm...

Humans exhibit a suite of biases when making economic decisions. We review recent research on the origins of human decision making by examining whether similar choice biases are seen in nonhuman primates, our closest phylogenetic relatives. We propose that comparative studies can provide insight into four major questions about the nature of human choice biases that cannot be addressed by studies of our species alone. First, research with other primates can address the evolution of human choice biases and identify shared versus human-unique tendencies in decision making...

Organisms must act in the face of sensory, motor, and reward uncertainty stemming from a pandemonium of stochasticity and missing information. In many tasks, organisms can make better decisions if they have at their disposal a representation of the uncertainty associated with task-relevant variables. We formalize this problem using Bayesian decision theory and review recent behavioral and neural evidence that the brain may use knowledge of uncertainty, confidence, and probability.

Disappointment entails the recognition that one did not get the value expected. In contrast, regret entails recognition that an alternative (counterfactual) action would have produced a more valued outcome. In humans, the orbitofrontal cortex is active during expressions of regret, and humans with damage to the orbitofrontal cortex do not express regret. In rats and nonhuman primates, both the orbitofrontal cortex and the ventral striatum have been implicated in reward computations. We recorded neural ensembles from orbitofrontal cortex and ventral striatum in rats encountering wait or skip choices for delayed delivery of different flavors using an economic framework...

Mood disorders are common and debilitating conditions characterized in part by profound deficits in reward-related behavioural domains. A recent literature has identified important structural and functional alterations within the brain's reward circuitry--particularly in the ventral tegmental area-nucleus accumbens pathway--that are associated with symptoms such as anhedonia and aberrant reward-associated perception and memory. This Review synthesizes recent data from human and rodent studies from which emerges a circuit-level framework for understanding reward deficits in depression...