Which motives drive the decision of a voter to approve or reject a policy proposal? The Public Choice literature distinguishes between instrumental and expressive voting motives. We investigate the importance of these motives by analysing the patterns of neural activity in different voting...

<b>Purpose:</b><br>This paper addresses the nature, formalization, and neural bases of (affective) social ties anddiscusses the relevance of ties for health economics. A social tie is defined as an affectiveweight attached by an individual to the well-being of another individual ('utilityinterdependence')....

We propose that individuals consider future versions of themselves to truly be separate persons, not simply as a convenient modeling device but in terms of actual brain systems and decision]making processes. Intertemporal choices are thus quite literally strategic interactions between multiple...

Die Bedeutung von Emotionen und Affekten bei ökonomischen Entscheidungen wird seit mehreren Jahren in der ökonomischen Literatur diskutiert (z. B. Rabin, 1998). Eine Erklärung der empirischen Evidenz in diesem Bereich, die über eine bloß phänomenologische Ebene hinausgeht, verlangt eine...

The concept of utility is often used in ambiguous ways in economics, from having substantive psychological connotations to being a formal placeholder representing a person's preferences. In the accounts of the early utilitarians, it was a multidimensional measure that has been condensed during...

Although decision makers are often reported to have difficulties in making comparisons between multi-dimensional decision outcomes, economic theory assumes a uni-dimensional utility measure. This paper reviews evidence from behavioral and brain sciences to assess whether, and for what reasons,...

Individuals in most industrialized countries have to make investment decisions throughout their adult life span to save for their retirement. These decisions substantially affect their living standards in old age. Research on cognitive aging has already demonstrated several changes in cognitive...