The neural basis of decision making

Decision making is the essence of the manager's job and represents a deliberate process that results in the commitment to a categorical proposition. This chapter explores its neural underpinnings by drawing on neuroscience and neuroeconomics. The neuroscience of decision making is multidisciplinary, drawing from economics, psychology, and neuroscience. A distributed network of brain regions support decision making. The neural basis of topics that are essential to the study of decision making, such as uncertainty, risk, and value-based decisions, is discussed. The chapter also addresses the role of System 1 and System 2 in decision making. The neural basis of other decision-making models, such as the diffusion decision model (DDM) is also explored. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the neural basis of the concepts of exploitation and exploration.