For anyone on the west side of Los Angeles, I'll be at the Rosegold Saloon tomorrow evening, presenting at the Pint of Science event there. I'll be giving an overview of my lab's research, pub style. We'll be wrestling with the age-old question - ale or lager? pintofscience.us/event/from-b...

Excited to share a new Trends in Cognitive Sciences paper that I had the pleasure to be a part of. This is an interdisciplinary perspective on the dynamics of cognitive costs, namely when these costs occur and how they impact our decisions. #neuroeconomics www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

The West Coast Neuroeconomics Mini-Symposium hosted by @radyschool.bsky.social just wrapped on Saturday, and it was a genuinely fantastic (always too brief) few days of science.
rady.ucsd.edu/2025-west-co...

We also find that people look less at the Buy option when there are explicit outside options. Overall, we identify two different attentional mechanisms by which the framing of opportunity costs (i.e., the outside options) impacts people's willingness to make purchases. 3/n

Across surpluses, people consistently purchase less with explicit outside options. Using a variant of the attentional DDM, we estimated separate attention discounts on the Buy and Don't Buy options. We find more discounting of the Buy option with explicit vs implicit costs. 2/n

New article on the role of attention in opportunity-cost neglect, with the fabulous Steph Smith and @spillersas.bsky.social. Outside options that are explicit (Keep Money) vs implicit (Don't Buy), attract more attention, both gaze and gaze effect on choice. 1/n authors.elsevier.com/c/1kycc_Ebvv...

What was really striking was the similarity of the temporal weighting function between the perceptual and economic tasks, both in the aggregate and across subjects. We estimated these weighting functions by having subjects report averages in real time using a joystick in the MRI.

The paper was led by former student Minhee Yoo. She found that, in addition to the cuneus in both tasks, the left dlPFC tracked the average evidence in favor of an option, in the economic task. People with a stronger primacy bias had higher activity in cognitive control regions (dlPFC, IPS).

🚨New paper in CABN with Brandon Turner's lab🚨
We use an averaging diffusion model and fMRI to study how the brain estimates average evidence in perceptual and economic tasks. We find recency and primacy effects that are highly consistent across tasks. link.springer.com/article/10.3...

One puzzle that emerged is that buyers do not respond optimally to slow rejections, which should signal that a slightly higher offer will likely suffice. Instead buyers are less likely to make a followup offer in such cases. This work was led by former student Miruna Cotet. 3/3

We analyzed millions of eBay bargaining threads and ran a field experiment with thousands of our own offers. We showed that the drift-diffusion model can account for these decisions, extending the scope of these models from seconds to hours and days. www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/... 2/3

Thrilled to share our new paper in PNAS on bargaining in the "wild" (eBay). We find that bargainers reveal private information by taking hours longer to reject good offers and accept bad offers. We can predict bargaining outcomes from response times. newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/res... 1/3

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