Over at Harvard Business School Working Knowledge (one of our favorite resources for what's new in negotiation studies), Jim Heskett, the Baker Foundation Professor at Harvard Business School, heralds the arrival of an avalanche of materials in neuroscience in Neuro Economics: Science or Science Fiction? 

We post a brief excerpt here, but recommend reading the entire article by clicking on the link above. 

Among the propositions advanced from this work thus far, for example, are that risk and return are assessed in different parts of the brain, thereby questioning theories regarding expected utility on which a great deal of decision theory has been based up to now. Thus, according to this research, different qualities of, say, investment decisions are made when perceptions of risk or greed (return) prevail in terms of heightened brain activity.

Another line of work involves the study of the best locus in the brain, conscious or subconscious, for making various decisions. For example, it is thought that more complex decisions involving hard-to-quantify factors are best made in the subconscious after some amount of preparation. That is, study the problem, sleep on it, and decide without further analysis. It's the type of decision making described by Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Blink.

According to this line of thinking, questions involving more quantifiable, straightforward considerations are best answered in the conscious portion of the brain, presumably after considerable conscious thought. Work in neuro marketing at Ludwig-Maximilians University in Munich now claims that strong brands create more excitement in decision-influencing areas of the brain than weak brands, even for mundane products.

Does this influence purchase decisions? Stay tuned.

For more on this topic, see Free Will:  Now You Have It, Now You Don't by Dennis Overbye from the New York Times.