The Neural Mechanism Of Investment Decision-making Under Risk And Amibiguity

The studies of decision-making have been a major thrust of many disciplinary fields such as management, economics and psychology for a long time. In management area, Simon, a Nobel laureate in economics, has proposed that "management is decision making". Especially in the current global economic crisis background, enterprises' business environment is rapidly changing, how to deal with a variety of uncertain situations and make decisions quickly and accurately becomes of paramount importance to managers. And the uncertain situations, according to their probabilities of possible results are known or not, can be divided into risk situations and ambiguous situations.Either the traditional decision theories or behavior decision theories, most of them focus on behavior level. Along with research goes thorough, research perspective has extended to psychological and cognitive level, and progressively got into physiological level. Recent advances in brain imaging techniques enable researchers to directly deep into brain, observe and study the neural mechanisms underlying individual economic decision-making behaviors, and to open up brain's black box. which provide deeper evidence for existing decision theories. And, more importantly, it seeks to formulate a more accurate neural decision-making model containing physiological variables, providing a useful guide to real economics decision-making situations.In this study, the process of decision making under risk and ambiguous situations as research object, using the experimental method of cognitive neuroscience and event related potential (ERP) as research tools, we design a investment game to study the neural basis of decision making under risk and ambiguity. Taking the advantage of high resolution of the time (accurate to milliseconds) of ERP, the study focuses on the neural activities of decision from decision makers facing the decision stimulus to making decisions (namely anticipated decision stage). Based on the research findings in decision science, cognitive neuroscience, neuroeconomics. management decision and behavior science field, and combining the ERP components with various procedures of the process time and behavioral related data analysis, the neural mechanism of decision making under risk and ambiguity is discussed, relevant research conclusions are as follows:(1) In information process procedure, ambiguous information is processed unconsciously before risk information, and obtained more attentional resources, which can be indexed by the ERP component P2.(2) In information process procedure, risk information is processed consciously after ambiguous information, which can be indexed by the ERP component N2.(3) In decision attitude shaping procedure, there are significant differences of attitudes between risk and ambiguity, decision makers shows a stronger tendency to ambiguous aversion, suggesting that decision processes of risk and ambiguity may involve different neural mechanisms, which can be indexed by the ERP component P3 and N4.