NEUROECONOMICS - ACTUAL DIRECTIONS IN BEHAVIORAL ECONOMICS

Our article offers a survey of behavioral economics and in its actual directions such neuroeconomics, including his historical origins, results, and methods. Our central thesis is that the development of behavioral economics in important respects parallels the development of cognitive science. Neuroeconomics has further bridged the once disparate fields of economics and psychology. Such convergence is almost exclusively attributable to changes within economics. Neuroeconomics has inspired more change within economics than within psychology because the most important findings in Neuroeconomics have posed more of a challenge to the standard economic perspective. The single most important source of inspiration for behavioral economists has been behavioral decision research, which can, in turn, be seen as an integration of ideas from cognitive science and economics. Neuroeconomics has primarily challenged the standard economic assumption that decision making is a unitary process a simple matter of integrated and coherent utility maximization suggesting instead that it is driven by the interaction between automatic and controlled processes. This article reviews neuroeconomic research in areas of interest to both economists and psychologists: decision making under risk and uncertainty, intertemporal choice, and social decision making.