Caltech

Articles tagged with "economics"

01/26/2013

For Love or Money: Marriage and Economic Development in the Past

Douglas Smith

Getting married and moving out of your parents' house may be key to your personal economic development, but are marriage patterns key to an entire society's development as well? Professor of Social Science History Tracy Dennison tells us what love's got to do with it at 8:00 p.m. on Wednesday, January 30, 2013, in Caltech's Beckman Auditorium. Admission is free.

02/24/2010

Caltech Scientists Find First Physiological Evidence of Brain's Response to Inequality

Lori Oliwenstein

The human brain is a big believer in equality—and a team of scientists from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, has become the first to gather the images to prove it. Specifically, the team found that the reward centers in the human brain respond more strongly when a poor person receives a financial reward than when a rich person does.

02/08/2010

Caltech Neuroscientists Discover Brain Area Responsible for Fear of Losing Money

Kathy Svitil

Caltech neuroscientists and their colleagues have tied the human aversion to losing money to a specific structure in the brain—the amygdala. The finding, described in the latest online issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, offers insight into economic behavior, and also into the role of the amygdala, which registers rapid emotional reactions and is implicated in depression, anxiety, and autism.

09/10/2009

Caltech Scientists Develop Novel Use of Neurotechnology to Solve Classic Social Problem

Lori Oliwenstein

Economists and neuroscientists from Caltech have shown that they can use information obtained through fMRI measurements of whole-brain activity to create feasible, efficient, and fair solutions to one of the stickiest dilemmas in economics, the public goods free-rider problem—long thought to be unsolvable. This is one of the first-ever applications of neurotechnology to real-life economic problems, the researchers note.

03/05/2009

Markets Are Better Than Patents in Promoting Discovery, Says Caltech Economists

Lori Oliwenstein

When it comes to intellectual curiosity and creativity, a market economy in which inventors can buy and sell shares of the key components of their discoveries actually beats out the winner-takes-all world of patent rights as a motivating force, according to a California Institute of Technology (Caltech)-led team of researchers.

02/15/2009

Caltech's Colin Camerer Makes a Game of Economic Theory

Lori Oliwenstein

"Economics is the field that has used game theory the most broadly to understand bargaining, pricing, firm competition, incentive contracts, and more," explains Camerer, who is the Robert Kirby Pr

05/19/2008

Caltech Researchers Reveal the Neuronal Computations Governing Strategic Social Interactions in the Human Brain

Kathy Svitil

In a strategic game, the success of any player depends not just on his or her own actions, but on the behavior of every other player in the game. To be successful, players must not only pay attention to what other players do, but also how they are thinking.

01/14/2008

Wine Study Shows Price Influences Perception

Kathy Svitil

A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but slap on a hefty price tag, and our opinion of it might go through the roof. At least that's the case with the taste of wine, say scientists from the California Institute of Technology and Stanford University.

01/10/2008

Designing the 700 MHz Auction

elisabeth nadin

It's been called beachfront property. Wireless companies are clamoring for pieces of it. The auction that will parcel it out will be the biggest of the next decade, with reserve prices set at $10 billion.

12/04/2006

Watson Lecture: European Conquest

John Avery

How did the West conquer the world? The secret, says California Institute of Technology economic historian Philip T. Hoffman: technological innovation.

10/20/2006

Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation Awards $24 Million to Caltech for Three Projects

Robert Tindol

The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation has awarded three grants totaling $24 million to the California Institute of Technology for projects in cosmology, experimental economics, and neurobiology.