Current Research

Neuroentrepreneurship: the Neuroeconomics of Entrepreneurship - research conducted in Germany with the Entrepreneurial Team at Max Planck Institute of Economics in Jena.

Irrational Equals Rational... how? where? contact me and let's discuss the research!

Neural substrates of human decision-making.

“General” economics ignores decision-making processes and looks only at the outcome of decisions. But the outcome (economic choices made based on preferences) can be influenced if the decision-making process is influenced. My research, in collaboration with Paul J. Zak and others, shows that hormonal state at the time of decision-making influences preferences. This implies that:

 
* Humans may change their preferences according to hormonal status of the brain from natural daily fluctuation – meaning that the Expected Utility Theory’s assumption of preference consistency is only valid if we control for the hormones of the human brain.

* Preference ordering (rank ordering) – an Expected Utility Theory axiom – may be impossible by humans at the decision-making level because of hormonal fluctuations.

* Preference ordering at the chemical level of the brain might be constant.

* What this means is that the Expected Utility Theory may hold but with some twists…

Expected Utility Theory

Is consistency based on biology or choice?

Trust

 
* What is the importance of trust in agents’ sharing their knowledge with their firms
* What can a firm do to enhance its corporate environment and positively influence its agents to share their knowledge?

* Economic theories (as in the Principal Agent Theory) assume that agents will only provide contracted effort. This implies that knowledge the agent has and which is not known by the firm will never be shared by the agent because there is no explicit contracted agreement. Yet, in real life, we see that people help each other with projects in firms and people share their knowledge – in the form of process improvement – even when that is not contracted and often only believed to be compensated in the future without any particular knowledge of the benefit to the agent.
* Why do agents share knowledge based on belief of future reward and without a contract?

To find answers to these questions, I ran economic decision-making experiments using a variety of hormones that stimulate particular responses in decision-making in certain predetermined directions. For example, I found in one of my experiments that generosity can be increased by 80% if a naturally occurring hormone in the brain, called Oxytocin, is temporarily increased in the brain.

http://www.neuroeconomicstudies.org/?page=published