Economics Neoclassical Model supposes an economic agent with a single decision center, the deliberative (the rational part of the brain), a model with many anomalies to explain economic behavior: of the consumer that not always maximizes its utility, of the businessman who sub-efficiently organizes his company, and many other biased and suboptimal decisiones of our every day life.
Nevertheless, Neuroeconomics and Behavioral Economics confirm that there are two decision systems: the affective and the deliberative, system 1 and 2. The system 1 (affective) corresponds more to the internal parts of the brain, that is, the most primitive in the evolutionary stage, and the system 2 (deliberative) is located in the cerebral cortex and appears in more recent stages of the evolutionary process. The affective system is related to emotions that have effects on the motivations of human behavior, with a value component always present, either biological (fear, hunger, sexual desire) or social (sympathy, hatred, distrust), and usually operates in meta-conscious form. The deliberative system, on the contrary, acts by evaluating what the affective system perceives, with which it is bound by biunivocal nervous connections, and over which it exerts a certain power by having its will power to correct the behavior that would be followed if it existed only the affective system, as it happens with the most primitive animals. The stimuli can affect the affective part only, or also the deliberative part, and depending on the evaluation of both systems, the behavior to be followed will be defined.
With these behavioral assumptions, neuroeconomists Loewenstein and O'Donoghue go a step further, to build a mathematical model that allows them to formalize this relationship. They assume that the human being faces a function to be minimized, which is the cost of his behavior. A part of the cost is the difference between what the deliberative system wants and what it ultimately obtains and another part of the cost is the effort that the deliberative system must make to turn the impulse of acting in a certain way.
[U (xD, c (s), a (s)) - U (xA, c (s), a (s))] + h (W, σ) [M (aA, a (s) - M (x, a (s))]
where U is a utility function, x the chosen course of action, of a set X, the supra-indexes D and A indicate the optimal behaviors for the deliberative and affective systems respectively, s is a vector of stimuli, ya (s) and c ( s) are the vectors of affective states of the affective and deliberative systems respectively related to these stimuli, h is the effort necessary to correct the desire that comes from the affective system, function of the power of the will, W and elements that weaken it, σ, and M are the courses of action of the affective system.
This model tells us that the deliberative system is subject to two forces: one from the deliberative system itself and another from the affective system. If the first one totally overrides the second one, the behavior followed would be xD, and if only the affective one prevails the behavior would be xA. However, what usually (but not always) happens is that an intermediate point is reached between both extreme positions. Subsequently, the authors apply this model to three different problems: intertemporal preference, risk behavior and altruism. In all three cases, they come to the conclusion that the affective system shares the regulation of behavior with the deliberative system, and that totally rational behaviors, derived from the deliberative system, are not what we find in reality.
Author: Sebastián Laza is an argentine economist, graduated from the National University of Cuyo (Mendoza, Argentina), specialized in the interrelation between Neuroscience and Economics, with postgraduate courses on the subject at the National University of La Plata (Buenos Aires, Argentina), National Research University, Higher School of Economics (Moscow, Russia) and Duke University (USA). Book: https://www.amazon.com/NEUROECONOMICS-DISRUPTIVE-PATH-Sebastian-Laza-ebook/dp/B07GJW1HCL
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