1. Same or different? Neuroeconomic mechanisms underlying private vs. corporate decision making.
- Author
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Schilling, Lukas, Lindner, Axel, Tank, Ann, Bornemann, Torsten, and Pedell, Burkhard
- Subjects
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DECISION making , *CONSUMER behavior , *THEORY of mind , *EMPLOYEE recruitment , *ECONOMIC impact , *NEUROECONOMICS - Abstract
The field of neuroeconomics has brought formerly distinct disciplines like neuroscience, economics and psychology closer together (Loewenstein et al., 2008). However, the context in which most neuroeconomic experimental settings are designed imply economic factors or economic consequences for individual or private decision makers. We argue that it is yet unclear, whether the findings generated in an individual or private decision context are transferable to corporate decision making contexts, for example, management decisions based on accounting information. Compared to an individual or private decision context, in a corporate decision making context decisions rarely have a direct private consequence for the decision-maker and the resources being decided upon are mostly not those of the decision-maker but those of the company. Previous neuroimaging findings have shown that risky financial decision making for oneself compared to decisions for others recruit fundamentally distinct neuronal processes: In decision-for-self conditions reward-related regions were more active, whereas brain regions related to theory of mind (ToM) showed greater activation in decision-for-other conditions (Jung et al. 2013). In our study we investigate whether there is a difference between the neuronal processes underlying decision making in a private decision setting and a corporate decision making setting. We conceptionally disentangle three context factors of private consumer decision making and corporate decision making: 1) the origin of money – private vs. corporate, 2) the benefit of the decision – for oneself vs. someone else, and 3) the motive of the decision – the decision is following a consummatory motive or a instrumental motive. We discuss the different effects of these parameters on brain activity and on decision-related emotional concepts, namely happiness and pain of paying based on prior research. The purpose of the study is to determine whether we can transfer neuroeconomic finings obtained from an individual or private decision situation to a corporate context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2022