Paul Glimcher
A ‘Brainy’ Approach to Economics and Psychology
Intro
Paul Glimcher is a neuroscientist, economist, psychologist, innovator and entrepreneur. His myriad different fields and interests eventually pushed him to help develop a new field: neuroeconomics. His revolutionary interdisciplinary approach has allowed him to put forth multiple theories about how humans behave and make decisions. Glimcher has become a greatly influential figure in the field of behavioral science as a result of the research he has conducted. He has written a plethora of inspiring articles and books and is perhaps most well-known for his contribution to the textbook Neuroeconomics: Decision Making and the Brain, the first text to examine the science behind economics.1 The textbook is now in its second edition and has become a standard reference for the field of neuroeconomics.
Paul Glimcher believed decisions could not wholly be explained through economic or mathematical models and thus birthed his atypical approach of using neuroscience to better account for the ways humans make decisions.2
A close relationship between the theory of economics, the theory of psychology, and the theory of neuroscience could be forged - but it would have to be forged by a partial reduction… as we adjust the conceptual objects in each discipline to maximize interrelations between disciplinary levels of analysis, we achieve both a formal reduction of two theories and a broadening range of the predictive range of both theories.
- Paul Glimcher in Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
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.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
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.
