KGJN researchers in PNAS
Tom Eichele and Kenneth Hugdahl at the KGJN Center publishes a Neuroeconomics study in the prestigious journal PNAS. The study is a collaboration between the Functional MRI-group at UiB and the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH). The study reveals centers in the brain involved in the computation of fairness.
Main content
The authors describe the significance of their work in the following way:
People’s preferences for income distribution fundamentally affect their behavior and contribute to shaping important social and political institutions. The study of such preferences has become a major topic in behavioral research in social psychology and economics. Despite the large literature studying preferences for income distribution, there is no direct neuronal evidence of how the brain responds to income distributions when people have made different contributions in terms of work effort. The present paper reports from, to our knowledge, the first neuroimaging study designed to examine how the brain responds to the distribution of income in such situations. As such, to our knowledge it is also the first study to examine the neuronal basis for equity theory.