Neuroeconomics: Decision Making and the Brain

Full course description

Neuroeconomics, sometimes also known as Decision Neuroscience, is an emerging field combining insights from economics, psychology and neuroscience to understand how (healthy) humans make decisions and how these are related to underlying cognitive and neural processes. The ultimate aim of Neuroeconomics is to integrate knowledge from the different parent disciplines to answer the fundamental question of how our brain makes us decide. This will help answering important questions like: Why are we procrastinating difficult choices? What makes us cooperating even with strangers? Why are we buying lottery tickets knowing that we almost certainly will lose our money? Why are bubbles on financial markets the standard rather than the exception?
This course provides an introduction to this exciting endeavour as well as a critical discussion and reflection on the most important results achieved so far. The course will introduce the general idea behind Neuroeconomics by discussing examples showing the limitations of viewing decision making merely through the lens of the traditional fields of economics, psychology and neuroscience.
The course will review various methods used in Neuroeconomics research for measuring and influencing brain activity. An important part of the course will be devoted to learning about the foundations and models of Neuroeconomics such as the basics of neuroscience (including cellular and anatomical structures of the brain), reward prediction error, drift diffusion and multiple self models and how these are related to more standard economic models of individual and interactive decision making (game theory).
Equipped with these tools and background, we will read, discuss, and critically evaluate seminal and recent studies in Neuroeconomics. Possible topics include:
* Subjective value and decision making: how does our brain evaluate, compare and make us choosing between different options?
* Decision-making under risk: what are the neural mechanisms underlying our decisions to gamble in the casino and buy insurance contracts?
* Decision-making over time: what are the brain areas that make us patient or impatient and how is their neural activity related to procrastination, need of deadlines and the proneness to intermediate gratification?
* Social decisions: what brain mechanisms make us humans be nice or nasty to other people? Are we intrinsically selfish or generous and how can we find out about it?
This interdisciplinary and challenging course consists of lectures and group work. It will use formal concepts from economics and neuroscience. Students should therefore not be afraid of mathematics. The course is ideal for students who are open minded towards methods and models from other disciplines and have a genuine interest in interdisciplinary thinking.