Browsing Category
Neuroeconomics
Decision making and the brain
The Mating Mind: Is Boosting Sex Appeal the Brain’s Primary Purpose?
The Mating Mind. A prof at the University of New Mexico has an interesting suggestion: the evolution of the human brain was largely driven by finding better ways to appeal to the opposite sex.
Geoffrey Miller is a man with a theory…
Better Brain Scans
Despite the pretty pictures generated by today's fMRI machines, they are lacking in both spatial and temporal resolution. Siemens is addressing this issue by commercializing a new kind of scanner technology that uses an array of sensors to…
High Testosterone Marketing
How does marketing to high-testosterone males differ from pitching their lower testosterone counterparts? And who are those testosterone-rich individuals?
Recent neuroeconomics research gives us some clues. As reported in the New…
Neuroeconomics: $1.5 Million to Study “Virtues”
Paul Zak, Director of Claremont?s Center for Neuroeconomic Studies, was awarded a $1.5 million grant from the John Templeton Foundation to continue researching, ?Oxytocin and the Neurobiology of Human Virtues: Resilience, Generosity, and…
Study: Taxes Aren’t Painful
Often, neuromarketing and neuroeconomic research seems to mostly confirm what we already knew, but a study at the University of Oregon produced results that are counter to what one might expect: rather than activating pain centers in the…
Twenty-somethings More Risk Averse Than Seniors
New neuroscience research shows that older individuals are less affected by the possibility of losing money than younger people. Gains, meanwhile, are equally attractive to both groups.
Gregory Larkin at Stanford University in…
Marginal Marketing
The concept of marginal utility, a favorite of economists, is fairly simple to illustrate: a $20 bill is more useful to a financially strapped college student than, say, Bill Gates. Researchers at the University of Cambridge in England…
Green Neuromarketing
My fellow FutureLab blogger, David Widger, wrote an interesting post, How Many Green Marketers Does It Take to Change a Light Bulb? In it he notes that fluorescent bulbs have proven difficult to market, despite today's lower bulb prices…
MEG Scanner Use Rising
The rising star of brain imaging is magneto-encephalography (MEG). Though the technology is far from new and the device looks like something from a 1950s science fiction movie, improvements in hardware and computing power are spiking…
The Pain of Buying
We recently reported on important new neuroeconomics research in Brain Scans Predict Buying Behavior. This study is the first that attempts to correlate fMRI brain scan data with actual purchasing behavior. George Loewenstein of Carnegie…
