How can neuroscience inform economics?

- Neuroscience has not yet had a large impact on mainstream economics.
- We review recent neuroscience research linking variables already of interest to economists.
- Neurobiological models of stochastic choice are particularly promising.
- Neuroscience also predicts previously unexpected effects of the economic environment.
- Non-choice data can be used to improve economic institutions.

Neuroeconomics is now a well-established discipline at the intersection of neuroscience, psychology and economics, yet its influence on mainstream economics has been smaller than on the other two fields. This is in part because, unlike neuroscientists and psychologists, most economists are not interested in the process of decision making per se. We argue that neuroscience is most likely to influence economics in the short run by providing new insights into the relationships between variables that economists already study. In recent years the field has made many such contributions, using models from cognitive neuroscience to better explain choice behavior. Here we review the work that we think has great promise to contribute to economics in the near future.