Doctoral Dissertation Research in DRMS: Essays on the Neural Basis of Consumer Choice

Doctoral Dissertation Research in DRMS: Essays on the Neural Basis of Consumer Choice

People are often confronted with a choice between options that are equally attractive, but for different reasons. How people choose between such seemingly equivalent options is a topic of considerable interest in a number of fields including Economics, Psychology, Finance and Marketing. One stream of research has shown that contextual factors' such as the addition of a third, unattractive option may make the choice between seemingly equivalent options easier. Another stream of research suggests that exertion of self-control on an initial task impacts how people choose between options on a subsequent task. While the effects of some of these contextual factors can be predicted, the underlying neural mechanism for these decisions is not well understood.

The proposed research will investigate the neural mechanisms underlying decision making using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). We will manipulate contextual factors to examine which of several extant models of decision making explain the process underlying choice. In particular, we will examine the impact of the addition of irrelevant alternatives on the neural mechanisms of decision making, and how the presence of the irrelevant alternative interacts with prior self-regulatory depleting tasks in influencing choice. The findings could be used to improve understanding of human decision making in a wide range of situations where decision makers have been shown to make suboptimal decisions.