Orbitofrontal Cortex Encodes Willingness to Pay in Everyday Economic Transactions

By H. Plassmann, John P. O'Doherty, Antonio Rangel. Journal of Neuroscience, 2007

889 citations recorded by the source corpus.

An essential component of every economic transaction is a willingness-to-pay (WTP) computation in which buyers calculate the maximum amount of financial resources that they are willing to give up in exchange for the object being sold. Despite its pervasiveness, little is known about how the brain makes this computation. We investigated the neural basis of the WTP computation by scanning hungry subjects' brains using functional magnetic resonance imaging while they placed real bids for the right to eat different foods. We found that activity in the medial orbitofrontal cortex and in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex encodes subjects' WTP for the items. Our results support the hypothesis that the medial orbitofrontal cortex encodes the value of goals in decision making.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, General Decision Sciences

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/514db6cd5473811e8f284a3a359a68688e59e968

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Citations in the corpus

The Reward Circuit: Linking Primate Anatomy and Human Imaging (2010, background): “Indeed, this line of reasoning is consistent with the observation that consideration of highly valued options elicits increased dorsolateral prefrontal cortical activation in purchasing scenarios (Knutson et al , 2007; Plassmann et al , 2007).”
Dissociable neural representations of future reward magnitude and delay during temporal discounting (2009, positive): “Given the role of the MPFC in integrating different kinds of value information (e.g., preference, likelihood, cost; (Knutson et al., 2003, 2005, 2007; O'Doherty et al., 2003a; Plassmann et al., 2007), these regions may integrate perceived benefits and costs to potentially inform upcoming choice.”
fMRI Reactivity to High-Calorie Food Pictures Predicts Short- and Long-Term Outcome in a Weight-Loss Program (2012, result): “For example, activity in IFG has been reported to positively correlate with participants’ valuation of food items during a decision task (Plassman et al., 2007; Hare et al., 2008).”
Informatic parcellation of the network involved in the computation of subjective value. (2014, background): “Finally, various parts of dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), which have been found in some studies to correlate with representations of stimulus values (Plassmann et al., 2007; Hare et al., 2009; Plassmann et al., 2010; Baumgartner et al., 2011; Hutcherson et al., 2012), were also not identif”
Emotion and the Prefrontal Cortex: An Integrative Review (2017, methodology): “, 2013; Clithero & Rangel, 2014), including the lateral OFC (Padoa-Schioppa, 2007; Rich & Wallis, 2016), medial OFC (Plassmann et al., 2007), pregenual anterior cingulate cortex (area 24/32; Chib et al.”
A current overview of consumer neuroscience (2008, methodology): “…outcome of experiments to date needs to be further validated and expanded, because of the complex data analysis required, the relatively small number of existing studies, and the relatively simple experimental setting that is necessary for conducting brain imaging studies (Plassmann et al., 2007a).”
NEUROBIOLOGY OF ECONOMIC CHOICE: A GOOD-BASED MODEL (2011, background): “For example, in a study by Plassmann et al. (2007), hungry human subjects were asked to declare the highest price they would be willing to pay for a given food (i.e., their indifference point, also called “reservation price”).”
An opportunity cost model of subjective effort and task performance (2013, positive): “…has been gleaned from single neuron recording (Lau & Glimcher 2008; Padoa-Schioppa & Assad 2006; 2008; Samejima et al. 2005), functional imaging (Kable & Glimcher 2007; Plassmann et al. 2007; Tom et al. 2007), and lesion studies (Camille et al. 2011; Fellows & Farah 2007; Rudebeck et al. 2008).”
Neuromarketing and consumer neuroscience: current understanding and the way forward (2015, background): “2014), pricing (Plassmann et al. 2007), product packaging (Reimann et al.”
Neuromarketing: the hope and hype of neuroimaging in business (2010, background): “The amount they were willing to pay (a measure of decision utility) correlated with activity levels in the medial orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) and prefrontal cortex (PFC”