Disentangling Motivational and Experiential Aspects of "Utility" - A Neuroeconomics Perspective

Ulrich Witt and Martin Binder ()

Papers on Economics and Evolution from Max Planck Institute of Economics, Evolutionary Economics Group

Abstract: Although decision makers are often reported to have difficulties in making comparisons between multi-dimensional decision outcomes, economic theory assumes a uni-dimensional utility measure. This paper reviews evidence from behavioral and brain sciences to assess whether, and for what reasons, this assumption may be warranted. It is claimed that the decision makers' difficulties can be explained once the motivational aspects of utility ("wanting") are disentangled from the experiential ones ("liking") and the features of the different psychological processes involved are recognized.

Keywords: utility; neuroeconomics; index number problem; wanting; liking; affective; forecasting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D87 B41 B12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo, nep-neu and nep-upt
Date: 2011-12-22
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations Track citations by RSS feed

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://papers.econ.mpg.de/evo/discussionpapers/2011-20.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: http://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:esi:evopap:2011-20

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.econ.mpg. ... arch/EVO/discuss.php

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers on Economics and Evolution from Max Planck Institute of Economics, Evolutionary Economics Group
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Karin Serfling ().