The role of intelligence in economic decision making

- Intelligence has a systematic relation with patterns of economic decision making.
- Higher intelligence may be associated with equilibrium behavior in competitive games, but not necessarily in general games.
- Simple reinforcement-learning models identify a systematic relation between cognition and reward processing.
- Properties of anatomical structures may explain the link between cognition and economic decision making.

Research on the link between intelligence and economic decision making is a recent development in the more general attempt to introduce theories of individual differences and personality traits into the analysis of economic behavior. We lay down here what we know from behavioral studies, from imaging studies, both functional and anatomical, and insights from decision theory and game theory. All the results point to a correlation and perhaps a deeper link between cognition and decision making, both in single-player and in strategic environments. We see several pieces of a puzzle, and provide some suggestions on how future research will discover the hidden image.