The first wave.

نویسنده

  • P Read Montague
چکیده

A new word: neuroeconomics According to Webster’s New Millennium Dictionary of English, neuroeconomics is ‘the study of the brain in making economic decisions, esp. to build a biological model of decision-making in economic environments’. This definition strikesme as odd. Isn’t ‘decision-making in economic environments’ a bit tautological? The concept of a decision always implies ‘against some limited resource constraint’, otherwise no decision would be necessary. And can anyone really describe for me a noneconomic environment? OK, I’m not a lexicographer, so I’ll stop there, but I’m fairly sure that living creatures don’t inhabit noneconomic environments even if they are abstractly possible to construct. But what about neuroeconomics? Apart from its apparent and growing popularity [1–5], why should we consider neuroeconomics a real area with real problems not yet answered? The answer: because organisms die – they can be killed, they can run out of energy and, even in the best conditions, they will age and die. Consequently, choices must be made and some choices are better than others. If organisms lived forever, then there would be no need for the concept of a choice. If energy could be acquired without effort, then the nature of choice for biological creatures would be dramatically different [6]. But alas mobile organisms run on batteries and have always been forced to be rapid-fire economic decision-makers that know how to value their past, present and future. Bad valuations or even a small hiccup in ongoing valuation mechanisms can result in the ultimate loss – death. These constraints have existed ever since life first evolved. Conclusion: real-world economics has always been an implicit partner to the problems tackled by neuroscience. Only recently has the knowledge and technology of neuroscience reached a point where basic economic questions can be probed in clearly defined experiments. From this perspective, neuroeconomics is a natural extension of the work that has taken place in neuroscience over the past 100 years. But this perspective is only one starting point. One might also begin a discussion of neuroeconomics by

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عنوان ژورنال:
  • Trends in cognitive sciences

دوره 11 10  شماره 

صفحات  -

تاریخ انتشار 2007