Dr.Krajbich is a young neuroeconomist who studies decision-making using computational models and/or economic modelling, as well as neuroscience tools including eyetracking, fMRI, tDCS and brain-damaged patients.
He has published in neuroscience journals including Science, PNAS,Psychological Science, Nature Neuroscience, Journal of Neuroscience, as well as economic journals including the American Economic Review:
https://economics.osu.edu/people/krajbich
http://faculty.psy.ohio-state.edu/krajbich/
Speech I
Title: A Common Mechanism Underlying Value-based Decision Making
Date and Time: 12/19 (四) 10:10-11:30am
Location: National Yang Ming University
Abstract:
People make numerous decisions every day including perceptual decisions like walking through a crowd, decisions over primary rewards like what to eat, and social decisions that require balancing own and others’ benefits. The unifying principles behind choices in various domains are, however, still not well understood. Mathematical models that describe choice behavior in specific contexts have provided important insights into the computations that may underlie decision making in the brain.
However, a critical and largely unanswered question is whether these models generalize from one choice context to another. Here I show that a model adapted from the perceptual decision-making domain and estimated on choices over food rewards accurately predicts choices and reaction times in three independent sets of subjects making social decisions. The robustness of the model across domains provides strong evidence for a common decision-making process in perceptual, primary reward, and social decision making. I also provide evidence that visual attention is a critical variable in this process.
Speech II
Title:Benefits of Neuroeconomic Modeling: New Policy Interventions and Predictors of Preference
Date and Time: 12/19 (四) 1:45-3:15pm
Location: Department of Economics, Nation Taiwan University
Abstract:
From its inception, neuroeconomics has promised to use knowledge from
neuroscience and psychology to improve models of economic decision
making. Here we deliver on this promise by introducing a
biologically-plausible (drift-diffusion) model of decision making that
is able to predict behavior, with fixed parameters, in random groups of
individuals across very different tasks. The model also goes beyond the
traditional economic approach because it is able to predict not only
choices but reaction times as well. But why should economists care about
modeling reaction times? For one, as predicted by the model, we
consistently observe that people spend too much time on irrelevant
choices for which they are nearly indifferent. In a world of time
constraints, time spent on unimportant decisions represents an
opportunity cost, namely time not spent on more important decisions. To
help subjects overcome this inefficient allocation of time, we designed
an intervention that puts a time limit on subjects’ choices. This simple
intervention substantially improved subjects’ welfare in a
time-constrained choice experiment. Second, the precise relationship
between reaction times and choice probabilities implies that reaction
times can be used to predict indifference points and the strength of
preferences. We demonstrate this ability using data from an Ultimatum
Game experiment. Overall, we show that better understanding the process
by which people make decisions can explain the basis for stochastic
choice behavior and help us do both normative and positive economics.