Meeting/Workshop
Neuroeconomics: studying decision-making in an economic context
June 13 - 14, 2019
Strasbourg (France)
PROGRAM
Why raising the price of a bottle of wine makes it taste better?
This is typically the kind of question that would interest both wine retailers and researchers in taste perception.
Now, the team of Antonio Rangel in Bethesda discovered that, if the judgement of wine drinkers on their tasting experience is altered by the knowledge they have of the product, it is not because they are inferring the quality of the wine based on its price but rather that they are actually experiencing a more flavourful wine (Rangel et al., 2008). The group observed that, during the experience, the activity of the medial orbitofrontal cortex of wine tasters (an area thought to encode for experienced pleasantness) was increased when drinkers had the information of a more expensive wine.
This study not only showed that the marketing actions can modulate neural correlates, but also demonstrates that the human consuming behaviour is not necessarily rational. In this sense, the result confirms observations made by Daniel Kahneman, a psychologist, and Richard Thaler, an economist, who were both awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002 and 2017 respectively for showing that humans are predictably irrational in ways that defy the Homo oeconomicus theory.
The discipline of neuroeconomics arose at the end of the 90s when mathematics solely became insufficient to the economists to explain the behaviour of some "economic agents" or even to explain more global economic phenomena. The biological approach then became necessary as emotion factors appeared crucial in those decision-making processes. Sociology latter joined in as studies showed that the individuals tended to modify their behaviour within a group (e.g. herd mimetic behaviour in speculative market). In return, the economics science provided a new approach with experimental standardized paradigms and tools to study the human behaviour when learning and practicing social exchange and cooperation.
In short, the agreement was that economists provided paradigms and neuroscientists provided the classic neurobiology tools such as fMRI or eye tracking systems to decipher the cerebral mechanisms underlying the consumer’s behaviour.
This is for the wedding picture.
In practice, the relationship between both fields is more complex. First, the limitation to interpret results obtained with imaging techniques constitutes a first obstacle to the development of the discipline. Second, the relevance of the findings has also been questioned by some economists as the scientifc gain of this disciplinary hybridization benefited mostly to the neuroscience field so far. Finally, the ethical implications (e.g. mercantile usage of equipments designed for the research or using theories and techniques to influence the consumers’ behaviour and the purchase process) also raise crucial questions.
The multidisciplinary Neurex workshop will gather experts from economics, neuroscience, psychiatry, and psychology, philosophy, finance and marketing, who will present their findings, concerns and perspectives on their research and on the discipline in general.
This Neurex workshop is co-funded by the University of Strasbourg Institute for Advanced Study (USIAS), the Neuropole and the University of Strasbourg.
THURSDAY JUNE 13TH
8.30-09.00 Registration – Welcome coffee
09.00-09.15 Welcome address
INTRODUCTORY SESSION
Chairman: Camillo PADOA-SCHIOPPA
09.20-10.00 Christian SCHMIDT (Paris, France)
Neuroeconomics, brief history and future prospects
10.00-10.40 Alan KIRMAN (Paris, France)
Helping us to understand individual and collective economic behavior:
the role of the neurosciences
10.40-11.00 Coffee break
SECOND SESSION
Chairman: Alan KIRMAN
11.10-11.50 Peiran JIAO (Maastricht, the Netherlands)
The Bull of Wall Street: experimental analysis of testosterone and asset trading
11.50-12.30 Aiste SEIBOKAITE-AMBRASE (Tübingen, Germany)
Sex hormones, decision-making and the brain
12.30-13.30 Lunch break
13.30-14.10 André SCHMITT (Strasbourg, France)
Behavioral finance: the disposition bias and the overconfidence bias
THIRD SESSION
Chairman: Sébastien BALLESTA
14.10-14.50 Camillo PADOA-SCHIOPPA (St Louis, USA)
A Neural Circuit for Economic Decisions
14.50-15.20 Peter DAYAN (Tübingen, Germany)
Savouring and its Modulation by Prediction Errors
15.20-15.50 Coffee break
15.50-16.30 Jan ENGELMANN (Amsterdam, the Netherlands)
Incidental aversive affect distorts the neural circuitry underlying decision-making
16.30-17.10 Irma KURNIAWAN (Zürich, Switzerland)
The influence of past actions in value-based decisions
17.30-18.45 CONFÉRENCE GRAND PUBLIC
Modérateur: Jean-Christophe CASSEL
Thomas BORAUD (Bordeaux, France)
Comment notre cerveau prend-il des décisions ?
FRIDAY JUNE 14TH
FOURTH SESSION
Chairman: Peter DAYAN
08.30-09.10 Gisèle UMBHAUER (Strasbourg, France)
The travelers’ dilemma: how the value of the luggage influences the behavior
09.10-09.50 Sebastian GLUTH (Basel, Switzerland)
Violations of economic rationality in reinforcement learning
09.50-10.20 Coffee break
10.20-11.00 Kai-Markus MÜLLER (Stuttgart, Germany)
Commercial applications of neuroeconomics
11.00-11.40 Thomas BORAUD (Bordeaux, France)
A natural history of cognitive skills
11.40-12.20 Jens HARBECKE (Witten, Germany)
Social Neuroeconomics (the INSOSCI European project)
12.20-13.30 Lunch
DATES AND VENUE
Strasbourg, 13-14th of June 2019.
Venue: MISHA, allée Rouvillois
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