In this working paper it is investigated how affect and cognition interact in consumer decision making. The research framework is multidisciplinary by applying a neuroscientific method to answer the question which information is processed during brand choice immediately when the decision is...

Economic theories of rational addiction aim to describe consumer behavior in the presence of habit-forming goods. We provide a biological foundation for this body of work by formally specifying conditions under which it is optimal to form a habit. We demonstrate the empirical validity of our...

In many research contexts it is necessary to group experimental subjects into behavioral “types.” Usually, this is done by pre-specifying a set of candidate decision-making heuristics and then assigning each subject to the heuristic that best describes his/her behavior. Such approaches might...

Social memory plays a pivotal role in social behaviors, from mating behaviors to cooperative behaviors based on reciprocal altruism. More specifically, social/person recognition memory is supposed, by behavioral-economic and game-theoretic analysis, to be required for tit- for-tat like...

Investors systematically deviate from rationality when making financial decisions, yet the mechanisms responsible for these deviations have not been identified. Using event-related fMRI, we examined whether anticipatory neural activity would predict optimal and suboptimal choices in a financial...

The traditional view in economics is that individuals respond to incentives, but absent strong incentives to the contrary selfishness prevails. Moreover, this “greed is good” approach is deemed “rational” behavior. Nevertheless, in daily interactions and in numerous laboratory studies, a...

Economics as a 'trade' does very well in New Zealand. Economists are taken relatively seriously in government policy processes. For better or worse, economic ideas were major drivers of the reforms in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Plenty of well-paid job opportunities exist in the private...