How people choose to spend money is often observable to others (e.g. based on their clothes, accessories, and social media pages), but there is a whole universe of financial decisions that are essentially unobservable (e.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAdults differ in the extent to which they find spending money to be distressing; "tightwads" find spending money painful and "spendthrifts" do not find spending painful enough. This affective dimension has been reliably measured in adults, and predicts a variety of important financial behaviors and outcomes (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFImproper use of pesticides on food plants can result in significant toxicity. In spite of regulations, enforcement, and prior episodes of poisonings, poisonings from misapplication of pesticides continues to occur. The objective of this study was to present a case series of toxicity resulting from ingestion of watermelon inappropriately treated with the carbamate insecticide aldicarb.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSince the advent of the discounted utility (DU) model, economists have thought about intertemporal choice in very specific terms. DU assumes that people make explicit trade-offs between costs and benefits occurring at different points in time. While this explicit trade-off perspective is simple and tractable, and has stimulated productive research, it does not provide a very realistic representation of a wide range of the most important intertemporal trade-offs that people face in daily life.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe "endowment effect" refers to the tendency to place greater value on items that one owns-an anomaly that violates the reference-independence assumption of rational choice theories. We investigated neural antecedents of the endowment effect in an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study. During scanning, 24 subjects considered six products paired with 18 different prices under buying, choosing, or selling conditions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeuroeconomics 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.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMicroeconomic theory maintains that purchases are driven by a combination of consumer preference and price. Using event-related fMRI, we investigated how people weigh these factors to make purchasing decisions. Consistent with neuroimaging evidence suggesting that distinct circuits anticipate gain and loss, product preference activated the nucleus accumbens (NAcc), while excessive prices activated the insula and deactivated the mesial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) prior to the purchase decision.
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