Toward a general theoretical framework for judgment and decision-making.

Abstract

Over the past 30 years, behavioral and experimental economists and psychologists have made great strides in identifying phenomena that cannot be explained by the classical model of rational choice—anomalies in the discounting of future wealth, present bias, loss aversion, the endowment effect, and aversion to ambiguity, for example. In response to these findings, there has been an enormous amount of research by behavioral scientists aimed at modeling and understanding the nature of these biases1. However, these models, typically assuming situation-specific psychological processes, have shed limited light on the conditions for and boundaries of the different biases, substantially neglecting their relative importance and joint effect. Much less attention has been paid to the investigation of the links between different biases. As a consequence of this approach, it is not always clear which model should be used to predict behavior in a new setting, and maybe a more general theory is needed. We believe that the field of neuroeconomics, which has experienced a rapid growth over the past decade, can play an important role in bridging these gaps, contributing to the building of a general theoretical framework for judgment and decision-making behaviors.