Abstract
The purchase and sale of assets such as housing will increasingly be affected by forces related to a changing climate. This article considers decisions over assets as a neurobiological process in which an associative memory with pattern completion informs choices. We develop these neuroeconomic explanations and analyze their implications for climate change-related shocks in asset markets, and discuss these effects in the context of both individual experiences as well as community-driven remembering. These neuroeconomic models provide mechanistic explanations for behavioral responses to more easily accessed information (the “representativeness” and “availability” heuristics, “framing” and “priming”). Understanding the links from neuroscience to economics is critical to building policies and institutions capable of coping with and adjusting to disasters affecting real assets that are increasing in frequency and scope due to climate change.
| Original language | English (US) |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 24-49 |
| Number of pages | 26 |
| Journal | Journal of Neuroscience, Psychology, and Economics |
| Volume | 16 |
| Issue number | 1 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Dec 15 2022 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The authors are grateful for research support from the Minnesota Agricultural Experiment Station and the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota as well as other internal sources from the University of Minnesota. The authors also thank Profs Jay Coggins and Stephen Polasky for comments, advice, and help with the article. The authors have no declarations of interest or competing interests to report.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 American Psychological Association
Keywords
- availability heuristic
- climate change
- content-addressable memory
- neuroeconomics
- neuroscience
