Risk and reward – is it all in our heads? A short survey of neuroeconomics

This is a mini review on the recent developments in the intriguing field of neuroeconomics that falls within the overlap between a number of contributing disciplines in the social and natural science – economics, psychology, neuroscience and medical imaging being the major ones. We start by providing a brief background of neoclassical approaches to studying decision-­‐making and work our way through the development of the field with increasing inputs from the behavioral sciences till the current point when the extra-­‐economic inputs to the study of economic decision-­‐making are no longer coming only from the cognitive psychologists but also from the computational neuroscientists and neuro-­‐physiologists. We explore the methodological challenges and opportunities of this new, inter-­‐disciplinary field of intellectual enquiry; and conclude by considering some of the major roadblocks that the field is faced with and finally positing some interesting future research directions.