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Neuronal Substrates for Choice Under Ambiguity, Risk, Gains, and Losses

Kansas State University, Department of Psychology, Manhattan, Kansas 66506
University of Minnesota, Carlson School of Management, Department of Accounting, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455
George Mason University, Economics and Law, Krasnow Center, 4400 University Drive, MSN 5C7, Fairfax, Virginia 22030
Veterans Affairs Medical Center, Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55417, and University of Minnesota, Department of Psychiatry, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55455
kip(ksu.edu
jdickhaut(csom.umn.edu
kmccabe(gmu.edu
pardo001(umn.edu

Economic forces shape the behavior of individuals and institutions. Forces affecting individual behavior are attitudes about payoffs (gains and losses) and beliefs about outcomes (risk and ambiguity). Under risk, the likelihoods of alternative outcomes are fully known. Under ambiguity, these likelihoods are unknown. In our experiment, payoffs and outcomes were manipulated independently during a classical choice task as brain activity was measured with positron emission tomography (PET). Here, we show that attitudes about payoffs and beliefs about the likelihood of outcomes exhibit interaction effects both behaviorally and neurally. Participants are risk averse in gains and risk-seeking in losses; they are ambiguity-seeking in neither gains nor losses. Two neural substrates for choice surfaced in the interaction between attitudes and beliefs: a dorsomedial neocortical system and a ventromedial system. This finding reveals that the brain does not honor a prevalent assumption of economics—the independence of the evaluations of payoffs and outcomes. The demonstration of a relationship between brain activity and observed economic choice attests to the feasibility of a neuroeconomic decision science.

History: Received: November 30, 2001;

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				J. Dickhaut, K. McCabe, J. C. Nagode, A. Rustichini, K. Smith, and J. V. Pardo From the Cover: The impact of the certainty context on the process of choice PNAS, March 18, 2003; 100(6): 3536 - 3541. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]