Managerial Decision-Making From the Perspectives of Behavioral Science and Neuroscience

The main criticism of previous managerial decision-making research that applies traditional self-report measurement has been the lack of dynamic analyses during decision making processes. For example, what psychological and neural activities happen during specific decision-making, which has been widely acknowledged to provide abundant information and insights beyond traditional self-report data. There is a growing concern about how to connect managerial decisions with decision makers’ perception, emotion, and experience. In recent years, the development of new research tools, including the behavioral and neuroscience technologies and/or methods (e.g., EEG, MEG, fMRI, Galvanic Skin Response, and eye-tracking), has offered a detailed glimpse into the underlying mechanisms of managerial decision-making, and provided researchers an opportunity to observe how decision-making operates at the behavioral and neural levels. By recording the implicit responses of individuals, the advanced research tools and/or methods have the advantages of supporting causal inferences among variables, improving the reproducibility of the study, providing various insights beyond traditional self-report data, and unraveling the whole processes during decision-making. With application of behavioral and neuroscience techniques, researchers have achieved a series of interesting and remarkable findings. For example, using EEG technology to detect underpinning brain responses, remarkable studies have enabled to investigate consumers’ different emotional experience elicited by various types of branded products. And studies in Neuromarketing and Consumer Neuroscience also have achieved advances in examining individual perceptual and emotional experience during the process of consumption decision. However, other managerial decision-makings beyond consumption decision have not been paid enough attention and thus need further investigation.

This Research Topic aims to prompt relevant research on managerial decision-making using behavioral and/or neuroscience technologies and methods. Original Research, Review, Policy and Practice Reviews, Book Review, Methods, Hypothesis and Theory, Opinion, Perspective and Conceptual Analysis are all welcome. And potential themes of interest include, but are not limited to the following areas:

- Consumer decision-making research (e.g., consumption decision, online consumer behavior).
- Business decision-making research (e.g., strategy choices about marketing, operation, and product development).
- Investment decision-making research (e.g., investment decisions for stocks, funds, and gold).
- Donation decision-making research (e.g., online donation behavior and donation motives).
- Online user behavior research (e.g., user behavior in social media and social commerce).
- Financial decision-making research (e.g., evaluation about lending object and choice of loan business).