Ernst Fehr

The role of neurobiology in social and economic decision-making

PublishedMarch 17, 2021
CategoryEconomics
Reading time10 min read
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Intro

Voted the most influential economist in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland,1 Ernst Fehr specializes in neuroeconomics and behavioral economics, with specific interests in fairness and social cooperation. His research, which incorporates elements of game theory and experimental economics, has informed the understanding of the evolutionary and neurobiological bases of altruistic behavior.

Fehr has been described as a leader in his field,2 with his work putting him at the forefront of behavioral science research. He has shed light on the mechanisms that underlie important areas of human behavior, advancing our understanding of how we make the decisions. Furthermore, the bridge he has built between biology and economics has encouraged an interdisciplinary approach to the study of human behavior, a feat gaining more and more traction among researchers in the behavioral sciences.

About the Authors

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Dan Pilat

Managing Director

Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.

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Dr. Sekoul Krastev

Managing Director & Co-Founder

Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.

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