Wednesday, October 1

5pm

Northwest Building, B-103

Neuroeconomics as a Unifying Approach Towards Understanding the Human Mind and Individual Behavior
In this presentation I argue that neuroeconomics can provide a unifying approach to understand both the human mind and individual behavior.  I illustrate my claim with two examples. In the first, we show that neural variables can be much more powerful predictors of out-of-sample behavior than behavioral variables. In particular, individual's willingness to redistribute income from rich to poor subjects is much better predicted by brain connectivity patterns elicited in a previous distribution task compared to the behavioral measures taken from this task. In the second example, we predict human motives that give rise to observationally equivalent behaviors such that behavioral data are - by design - incapable of predicting the underlying motives. We show that different motives for identical behaviors have distinct neural signatures that can be used to predict subjects' motives in the absence of discriminating behavioral evidence. These neural signatures thus provide a microfoundation of motives in terms of brain circuitry.  Post-talk commentary by Professor Drazen Prelec (MIT)