Ökonomische Entscheidungen unter Stress - Verhaltensbezogene und psychoneuroendokrinologische Aspekte

行为经济学的研究重点是人们如何做出决策，而不是规范地描述一个虚构的“经济人”的最优决策。近年来，人们可以观察到，经济学家对经济决策背后的心理和神经生物学机制越来越感兴趣，但决策者的环境或内部条件在很大程度上被忽视了。心理学研究表明，其中一个可以强烈影响决策(以及一般的认知过程)的因素就是压力。经济决策确实往往是在压力下做出的，例如，在时间压力、高工作要求、竞争或失业威胁下。研究发现，无论是急性压力还是慢性压力，都会影响工作记忆功能、反馈学习和其他对决策很重要的高级认知功能，这表明压力也应该影响经济决策。该项目将通过实验室实验，系统地研究急性和慢性压力对经济决策的影响。鉴于压力反应的性别差异已经得到了很好的证明，我们进一步假设，压力反应的差异可以帮助解释经济研究中发现的一些异质性。

Research in behavioural economics focuses on how people make decisions rather than normatively describing optimal decision making of a fictitious “homo oeconomicus”. In recent years one could observe a rising interest among economists in psychological and neurobiological mechanisms underlying economic decision making, but environmental or internal conditions of decision makers have been largely ignored. Psychological research indicates that one such factor that can strongly influence decision making (and cognitive processes in general) is stress. Economic decisions indeed often have to be taken under stress, e.g., under time pressure, high job demands, competition, or threat of job loss. Stress, both acute and chronic, has been found to influence working memory functioning, feedback learning, and other higher cognitive functions that are important for decision making, suggesting that stress should also influence economic decision making. This project will systematically investigate the effects of acute and chronic stress on economic decision making, using laboratory experiments. Given that gender differences in stress responsiveness are well documented, we furthermore hypothesize that differences in stress responses can help explaining some of the heterogeneities found in economic research.