Our projects apply functional magnetic imaging to the study of decisions, especially decisions with economic or moral consequences.
One project investigates brain mechanisms of implicit trust, specifically in the context of customers trusting financial advisors that physically resemble them. A second looks at self-deception, whether brain imaging can reveal non-conscious awareness of bad financial or medical news. A third examines whether costly honesty is intrinsically rewarding, as shown by brain activation. A fourth studies how satisfaction with a purchase is affected by method of payment.
The Brain as Decision Maker MIT Video
Key publications
Works in Progress
- Mijovic-Prelec, D., Huang, A., Long, C., Luchini, S., Hadjikani, N., and D. Prelec (2016). “Behavioral and Brain Mechanisms of Self-signaling under Oath.”
- Hadden, T., Prelec, D., Gabrieli, J., and D. Mijovic-Prelec. “Feeling right, even when you’re wrong: Neural mechanisms supporting reward-related self-deception”
Other Publications
- Banker, S., Dunfield, D., Huang, A., and D. Prelec. Neural mechanisms of credit card spending. Scientific Reports, 2021. 11, 4070
- Collell-Talleda, G., Prelec, D. and K. R. Patil. A simple bagging based plug-in ensemble for binary and multiclass imbalanced data, Neurocomputing, 2018, 275, 330-340.
- McKay, R., Mijovic-Prelec, D. and D. Prelec. “Protesting too much: Self-deception and self-signaling.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2011, 34, 34-35.
- Mijovic-Prelec, D. and D. Prelec. “Self-deception as self-signaling: A model and experimental evidence.” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biology, 2010, 365, 227-240.
- Loewenstein, Y., Prelec, D., and S. Seung. “Operant matching as a Nash equilibrium of an intertemporal game.” Neural Computation, 2009, 21 (10), 2755-2773.
- Knutson, B., Wimmer, E., Rick, S., Hollon, N.G., Prelec, D., and G. Loewenstein. “Neural antecedents of the endowment effect.” Neuron, 2008, 58 (5), 814-822.
- Knutson, B., Rick, S., Wimmer, E., Prelec, D., and G. Loewenstein. “Neural predictors of purchases.” Neuron, 2007, 53, 147-156.
- Camerer, C., Loewenstein, G., and D. Prelec. “Neuroeconomics: Why economics needs brains,” Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 2004, 106, 555-579.
© 2021 MIT Sloan Neuroeconomics Lab
MIT Sloan Neuroeconomics Lab 