The present investigation explores the neural mechanisms underlying the impact of social influence on preferences. We socially tagged symbols as valued or not — by exposing participants to the preferences of their peers — and assessed subsequent brain activity during an incidental processing...

Neuroeconomic conditions for "rational addiction" (Becker and Murphy, 1988) have been unknown. This paper derived the conditions for "rational addiction" by utilizing a nonlinear time-perception theory of "hyperbolic" discounting, which is mathematically equivalent to the q-exponential...

Since the advent of the discounted utility (DU) model economists have thought about intertemporal choice in very specific terms. DU assumes that people make explicit tradeoffs between costs and benefits occurring at different points in time. While this explicit tradeoff perspective is simple and...

Much is understood about loss aversion (the tendency for losses to have greater hedonic impact than comparable gains), but open questions remain. First, there is debate about whether loss aversion is best understood as the byproduct of a single system within the brain that treats losses and...

Arousal-related fluctuations of cortical activity are ubiquitous in the mammalian brain and vary spontaneously with neuromodulatory catecholamine levels. How such endogenous changes in brain state impact on behaviour is incompletely understood. Here, we investigate the neural mechanisms by which...

I present a theoretical framework that shows how self-control could have evolved as a mechanism to make humans behave against their own self-interest. I analyze the evolution of self-control in a principal-agent framework, in which the agent has access to private information, but his utility...

We introduce a neureconomic "autopilot" model of habit, based on many studies of animal learning and human habituation. In this approach, there are two systems for valuation-- habit and goal-directed. The habitual system recalls the previous choice (which can be dependent on a contextual state),...