The Biological Basis of Economic Choice

Abstract

This chapter explores behavioral, neural, and theoretical discussions about economic decision-making. It focuses on the reinforcement learning theory in the brain's valuation circuit. It discusses the simple normative strategies that rodents can use to maximize reward. The chapter also focuses on using statistical decision theory to identify normative benchmarks that answer how rodents should choose between options given an uncertain environment, and compares rodent behavior to these benchmarks using several examples from the timing and numerosity domain. It introduces the influential drift diffusion model and shows briefly how it can be used to study the dynamics of the choice process. The chapter presents temporal and possibly numerical decision-making as a special case of decision-making under uncertainty. These are interesting cases of decision-making, particularly because reward-maximizing temporal strategies are heavily constrained by representational uncertainty characteristics and should be shaped by the psychophysical properties of these domains.

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