Neuroeconomics and Economic Methodology

This paper critically reviews the first decade of neuroeconomic research from a methodological perspective. It examines details of specific examples of neuroeconomic hypothesis construction and testing in order to illustrate and substantiate a critical perspective articulated in previous work (Harrison and Ross 2010). According to this view, neuroeconomics is methodologically Janus-faced. To the extent that neuroeconomists have sought to provide neural foundations for revisionist behavioral economics, the results have in general been unconvincing. However, the chronologically original brand of neuroeconomics, which developed organically from the study of reward processing and learning by computational learning theorists, consistently demonstrates applications of sound economic methods. Furthermore, its most explicit methodological architect, Paul Glimcher, has clearly articulated a research program that directly and formally integrates computational learning theory with standard microeconomics