Potentials of neuroeconomic analysis

Seminar paper from the year 2010 in the subject Economics - Micro-economics, grade: 1,3, University of Osnabrück, language: English, abstract: This text discusses implications of neuroeconomic research for microeconomics. Neuroeconomic analysis might present evidence that preferences are not the starting point of the decision process (as the revealed preference framework assumes) but that preferences and therefore decisions depend on internal states that neuroeconomics might reveal. Results of neuroeconomic experiments that deal with the trust game, conducted by Zak et al.(2004), can be interpreted as an example of the state - dependency of preferences: if individuals receive oxytocin, they change their behaviour in the way that they give more money to the second player than otherwise. The suggestion that this data (like the activation of certain brain areas) is important for making decisions leads to the fact that neuroeconomics seeks to use this "non-choice data" to explain behaviour. This is in contrast to existing approaches where only choice evidence is used.