Section 1

Accordingly, the first section of this book is broken into 4 components. Chapters 1 and 2 describe the theory and methods of experimental economics. For someone trained in economics these chapters would be entirely superfluous. They are intended for neurobiologists and psychologists who are trying to get a handle on economic thought as a preparation for the second through fifth sections of the book. For someone who knows a little economics but who has not been formally trained in economics, these two chapters are essential. Chapters 3 and 4 (along with the appendix) provide a survey of the psychology of Judgment and Decision Making. These chapters should be of particular value to economists and neuroscientists unfamiliar with that tradition. Chapters 5 and 6 are designed to provide basic literacy in the fundamental methodologies of neuroscience for non-neuroscientists. Social scientists who hope to make sense of the empirical chapters that follow are urged to take particular care in reading Chapter 5 which provides a primer on basic neuroscience and Chapter 6 which describes the many methods of neuroscientific research. Even for those non-neuroscientists familiar with basic neuroscience, Chapter 6 should provide a valuable source for understanding the limitations of methods employed in neuroscientific research that can be consulted as one reads the rest of the book. Finally, Chapter 7 provides a useful introduction to the study of non-human animals in decision making. For those whose work, or studies, have focused exclusively on human decision makers, this chapter should provide a clear motivation for understanding the studies of non-human decision makers provided throughout this volume.

For instructors using this volume as a textbook in a graduate or undergraduate class, the first section should typically not be presented in its entirety. If the course is, for example, being presented in a department of psychology as an advanced elective, Chapters 1 and 2 may be all that is required for most students. If the course is for students from many backgrounds, Section 1 may be an appropriate object for self-study early in the class sequence.

Section 2

The second section of the book presents core concepts that guide much neuroeconomic research. The section begins with a first chapter that deals with the basic neural foundations of subjective value in simple binary choice situations and is followed by chapters that engage central notions in neuroeconomic research. Several of the chapters of this section focus on the notion of preferences; they describe a core idea in the study of decision making at both a behavioral and a neuroscientific level of analysis. Thus Chapter 9 in this section presents a detailed account of the notion of risk-preference. It describes economic and psychological models of risk preferences that have guided neuroscientific research and then provides a detailed review of current neuroeconomic research in this subarea. Other chapters in this section develop this same theme for intertemporal preferences, social preferences, and for the impact of emotion on preferences. Chapter 13 describes a wealth of research suggesting that neural activity encodes the value of goods and action in a single common neural currency – an idea closely related to the economic notion of utility. Over the last decade, this idea has emerged as a central theme in neuroeconomic research and this chapter reviews those important findings. The section closes with a review of what might be called the chemistry of choice (Chapter 14). It examines an emerging thrust of neuroeconomics: the study of how pharmacologic agents like the hormone oxytocin influence choice behavior. To achieve that goal it provides a basic review of neuropharmacology that will be of particular interest to non-neuroscientific readers.

Section 3

The third section of the book focuses on how we learn and represent value. The first chapter in this section (Chapter 15) provides a much-needed overview of the neurobiology of reinforcement learning and dopamine. This is an area where tremendous progress has been made in computational neuroscience and the chapter provides a clear summary of the mathematical and empirical bases for understanding how “values” are learned by the mammalian brain. This will be new material for many economist readers, but even for neurobiologists familiar with studies of the neurotransmitter dopamine, this chapter should provide an important computational foundation. The second chapter of the section, Chapter 16, extends these ideas with a review of advanced topics in reinforcement learning. Together Chapters 15 and 16 should provide an essential starting point for anyone interested in the neural basis of valuation. Chapter 17 builds on these ideas, and requires some familiarity with the material in Chapter 15. It discusses advanced topics in value encoding in other brain areas and presents data on current research frontiers in reinforcement learning. The section concludes with Chapter 18 which presents alternative views of many of the ideas presented in the first three chapters of this section – including important challenges to the core theories presented in the preceding chapters. This chapter will be of particular interest to behavioral economists.

Section 4

The fourth section presents an overview of the choice process: the neural mechanism that takes value or sensory evidence as an input and triggers action as a behavioral output. It begins with two chapters that examine the two main neuroscientific threads in the study of choice: perceptual decision making and value-based decision making. These are followed by a series of chapters that examine advanced topics in this area. Chapter 21 describes evidence that multiple neural systems interact during the choice process. Chapter 22 examines cutting-edge research on the multiple brain systems that integrate costs and benefits in the generation of choice. Chapter 23 describes neuron-level modeling that is beginning to reconcile perceptual, value-based, and cost-related decision making in a single framework. The final chapter in this section examines well-known violations of traditional choice theory and explores the emerging notion that neurobiological constraints may underlie many of these phenomena.

Section 5

This section concludes the volume with an overview of social decision making, within the framework of game theory. Building explicitly on the material presented in Chapter 11 and in Chapter 2, this section of the book explores the neurobiology of social decision making in some detail. It begins with an...