Biological Foundations of Economic Decision Making

Summary

While many different drivers of individual decision-making, like the role of socioeconomic factors, demographic factors such as age and gender, or the influence of choice architecture, have received considerable attention, more fundamental, rudimentary aspects like biological factors that drive economic behavior are still poorly understood. This special issue focuses on different biological aspects that underlie economic decisions. In particular, we would welcome contributions that study the connection between economic behavior and brain activity (e.g., neuroimaging data), hormonal aspects (e.g., administered hormones, blood samples, pregnancy, menstrual phase, 2D:4D ratio), the microbiome, and genes and heritability (e.g., gene-environment interactions, polygenic scores, studies with twins, siblings or adopted children).

We aim for articles from different disciplines, especially psychology and economics, which study individual decision-making (thus excluding work on household or collective group decisions). If they are based on experiments, these studies should preferably use incentivized measures to examine behavior. We will also welcome review articles or meta-analyses. Besides fulfilling the Journal’s excellent submission standards, we plan to exclude work based on candidate genes and underpowered analyses (<0.8). Additionally, we would value research that uses pre-registration plans and would only accept authors that, subject to IRB and privacy restrictions, will make their data and instructions available to foster transparency and allow replications.

The deadline for submission for this Special Issue is 31st May 2022.

Coordinating Guest Editor

Kim Fairley (Leiden University)

Guest Editors:

Helena Fornwagner (Universität Regensburg)

Aysu Okbay (VU Amsterdam)

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