Economics: Brain, Behavior and Institutions

Economics is a science about choices people make when they face resource scarcity, and aggregate effects of these choices. Generally, human’s decisions are shaped by two huge forces: internal – their own brains, and external – institutions. Brain processes rewards and risks, learns and motivates actions. Repetitive behavioral patterns are routinized, exchanged and adopted, and finally emerge into constantly evolving institutions. 

Throughout the course we time after time start from the middle layer of this scheme: behavior, which students exhibit during classroom experiments. We then discuss experiments, build agent-based models of behavior, and then move in two directions: toward biology, and toward institutions, studying how individual choices are made, and what that might mean in aggregated sense. We learn to construct economic structures behind empiric material and explain observed behavior from institutional and neuroeconomic frameworks.