Sanfey Science 2007
Citation
Alan G. Sanfey. Social Decision-Making: Insights from Game Theory and Neuroscience Science 26 October 2007: Vol. 318 no. 5850 pp. 598-602
Online version
Summary
This paper presents a discussion on social decision making. They combine contributions from the fields of Game Theory and Neuroscience into a new field called as Neuroeconomics. The common belief in the Game Theoretic community is that human players are perfectly selfish and the actions they will take will maximize the benefit to them. However this has not been observed empirically in experimental settings on human settings. For e.g. in a prisoner's dilemma setting, it is predicted from game theory that the dominant strategy is for both the player's to defect. However it has been observed empirically that mutual cooperation seems to be fairly common instead. Humans seem to employ concepts such as morality, ethics, trust and fairness into their decision making. Thus the utility function prescribed by Game Theory cannot be described as the most accurate or the most representative. They also examine the effects in the brain such as in the domain uptake pathway and the regions in the brain that get activated during the decision making process.
