Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis

A new academic field, neuroeconomics, has emerged at the border of the social and natural sciences. This book argues that a meaningful interdisciplinary synthesis of the study of human and animal choice is not only desirable, but also well underway, and so it is time to develop formally a foundational approach for the field. This book does so by laying the philosophical and empirical groundwork and integrating the theory of choice and valuation with the relevant physical constraints and mechanisms. While there has been an intense debate about the value and prospects of neuroeconomics, this book argues that existing data from neuroeconomics' three parent fields-neuroscience, psychology, and economics-already specify the basic features of the primate choice mechanism at all three levels of analysis. Its central argument is that combining these three disciplines gives us enough insight to define many of the fundamental features of decision making that have previously eluded scholars working within each individual field.