Economics ePosters

Economic decision-making theories typically assume rationality, where choices are driven by the subjective value (utility) of options independently of context. The Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA) axiom formalizes this premise, stating that decisions between two options should not be influenced by the…

The brain's ability to make economically efficient decisions plays a crucial role in processes like foraging and risk management. Given the inherent uncertainty about reward outcomes and world's latent states, the brain needs to construct distributional beliefs to enhance its performance in the decision-making…

People often choose immediate certain outcomes over delayed uncertain ones, even when the latter are more beneficial. This suggests that delay and uncertainty diminish the perceived value of a reward - a phenomenon known as delayed probabilistic discounting (DPD). Studying discounting mechanisms is critical to…

A principle of modern decision theories is reference dependence, in which the subjective value of a reward is computed relative to an internal reference point that is thought to reflect expectations. Previous work often assumes that reference points are retrospective, deriving directly from past experiences. We used…

Our scarcest resource is time. Humans and other animals allocate their time on a vast number of different activities – from reading a paper, pursuing a degree, or foraging for food. Optimal, reward-maximizing, behavioral strategies must balance expected future gains with irrecoverable time investment. However, humans…

Value optimization is a defining principle of economic behavior. To uncover the underlying psychological and neural processes, we developed a behavioral task based on the ‘knapsack problem’. Given several items, each with a value and weight, the objective is to maximize value within the weight limit of the knapsack.…

Converging evidence suggests that we make decisions by comparing the value of the options in front of us, but how are these values represented in the brain? Many models assume that the representational geometry of value is linear, and this shape could be important for generating rational economic decisions. However,…