Neurofinance

Financial decisions are crucial life-shaping decisions and the importance of understanding their underlying neural mechanisms has recently gained much attention. Latest research in finance and cognitive sciences is highlighting the link between emotions and decision making, pointing out to the need of widening the knowledge of the influence of emotional mechanisms on financial choices. Neurofinance is an emerging field of research which aims at improving the micro foundation of financial decisions, through the exploitation of an interdisciplinary approach that merges economics, neuroscience and psychology. Neuroscientific techniques such as fMRI, eye tracking, EEG are helping financial researchers in collecting new measures of individuals’ emotive features and automatic behavioral mechanisms, whose role has been largely disregarded by economists since the difficulty to quantify them. The neurofinance research program is therefore shedding light on the neural substrates that drive agents’ behavior in financial markets, in situations of intertemporal choices, risk, uncertainty, or ambiguity, investment and funding decisions, and trading in asset markets.

In this Research Topic, we wish to advance our understanding of decision making in the financial domain and we invite submissions that fall within the following subject areas:

-Original research articles that focus on the neural bases of financial information processing, trading in asset markets, investment or funding decisions, inter-temporal choices in financial markets, risk-taking behavior;
-Reviews and meta-analysis of the neurofinance research program, conducted using different methodological approaches (fMRI, eye tracking, EEG-signal recording and/or hormone level detection).