THE FUTURE OF NEUROECONOMICS

The birth of Neuroeconomics has created one of those rare historical moments in which economists stop to reflect on the fundamental questions of our science: the interdisciplinarity of the approaches to the economic problem, the frontiers of the economy, its objectives, questions of validity or refutation of theories, among others. The debate is hot today, and is on the agenda of many important economic congresses around the world, and the waters are partly divided, although generally more inclined in favor of this novel research program.

On the side of the detractors, we have as extreme the already famous Gul and Pesendorfer, for whom Neuroeconomics is and will be irrelevant to the Economy, both in empirical evidence and in explanatory power, since, according to them, Economics and Neuroeconomics formulate different questions and as a result, use different abstractions. For both authors, economic models should not make assumptions about the psychology of the brain; giving Neuroeconomics only the modest role of inspiration for economists, as new neuro studies unravel new issues related to decision-making, and as long as the models include variables about what an economic agent chooses and not about how an economic agent chooses.

Luckily, today most of the profession thinks Neuroeconomics is relevant to economic theory, in fact there are those who think that Neuroeconomics will allow Economics, traditional social science, to approach the methods of natural sciences, which use inductive behavior much more than deductive behavior, and they tend to be more rigorous from the epistemological point of view than social ones.

Who can have doubts that the Neuroeconomics, in a short period of time, will help us understand economic issues as psychologically intricate as the phenomena of monetary illusion, Keynesian sticky prices and strategic interaction in game theory, among other issues; all questions that today the mathematical economy of perfect rationality does not leave well founded at all.

Today, it is difficult to find theoreticians as Gul and Pesendorfer who criticize the neuroeconomic program frontally, since most still see it as "a hope", rather than as a "hype". In fact, the authors already speak of two different neuroeconomies, or rather, of two different research programs within the same field: Behavioral Economics in the Scanner (BES) and Neurocellullar Economics (NE).

With regard to BES, it is the branch of Neuroeconomics that tries to test via neuroimaging (among other techniques) the main postulates of the Behavioral Economy; while the other branch (NE), follows the opposite way: apply economic models to understand the functioning of the brain.

Finally, it will be the epistemology of the economy that ends up deciding the scientific validity of the Neuroeconomy, in any of its two branches. In the opinion of Bernheim, an scholar in some way critical of Neuroeconomics, only when this nobel and hybrid discipline provides us with a model that improves our measurement of the causal relationships studied by traditional models, will have passed the necessary test for its full acceptance. This is what has been called the Bernheim Challenge. This is the result of the epistemological legacy of Milton Friedman, back in the mid-twentieth century, to establish the armor that still today scientifically supports traditional economic theory, since the latter predicts quite acceptably, despite its assumption of unreal rationality.

But suppose neuroeconomic models do not manage to overcome the traditional ones in predictive capacity and only equals them, neuroeconomists can not be satisfied with the triumph of the "anything goes while predicting the model well". If neurosciences allow us to correctly model human rationality when making economic decisions, neuroeconomists have a scientific (and moral) obligation to use such knowledge, although there is a possibility that the models become more complex. It is up to a question of "tranquility of scientific conscience". In this sense, we share with Antonio Rangel that Neuroeconomics can very well become a field of specialization within the economy, regardless of whether or not it meets the Bernheim challenge.

Author: Sebastián Laza (economist)