“ The role of cognitive control and emotions in decision - making : a neuroeconomics perspective ”

One of the problems with treating cognitive control in economic decision-making is that there is a resilient idea that control makes behavior rational and that emotions make it irrational. The relatively dualistic or unitary nature of decision processes is critically compared from a neuroeconomics perspective in different well known behavioral settings, such as loss aversion, temporal discounting, ambiguity aversion, framing effects and strategic interactions. We claim that neither dualistic models – that stress the relative independence of sub-systems that can independently generate a decision nor unitary models, capture some important aspects of how the brain processes decisions. Our interpretation of the neural data will be in line with a “weak” dual model approach. Such a model constitutes, arguably, an example of how decision theory might go beyond descriptive adequacy thanks to the balanced use of traditional modeling approaches and neuroscientific ones.