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  3. Las Vegas uses flashing lights and ringing bells to create an illusion of reward and to encourage risk taking. Insurance company

Las Vegas uses flashing lights and ringing bells to create an illusion of reward and to encourage risk taking. Insurance company

admin2021-02-21  31
问题    Las Vegas uses flashing lights and ringing bells to create an illusion of reward and to encourage risk taking. Insurance company offices present a more depressing mood to remind us of our mortality. Every marketer knows that context and presentation influence our decisions.
   For the first time, economists are studying these phenomena scientifically. The economists are using a new technology that allows them to trace the activity of neurons inside the brain and thereby study how emotions influence our choices, including economic choices like gambles and investments.
   For instance, when humans are in a "positive arousal state," they think about prospective benefits and enjoy the feeling of risk. All of us are familiar with the excitement that accompanies a triumph. Camelia Kuhnen and Brian Knutson, two researchers at Stanford University, have found that people are more likely to take a foolish risk when their brains show this kind of activation.
   But when people think about costs, they use different brain modules and become more anxious. They play it too safe, at least in the laboratory. Furthermore, people are especially afraid of ambiguous risks with unknown odds. This may help explain why so many investors are reluctant to seek out foreign stock markets, even when they could diversify their portfolios at low cost.
   If one truth shines through, it is that people are not consistent or fully rational decision makers. Peter L. Bossaerts, an economics professor at the California Institute of Technology, has found that brains assess risk and return separately, rather than making a single calculation of what economists call expected utility.
   Researchers can see on the screen how people sort their choices into different parts of their brains. This may not always sound like economics but neuro-economists start with the insight—borrowed from the economist Friedrich Hayek—that resources are scarce within the brain and must be allocated to competing uses.
   Neuro-economics is just getting started. The first major empirical paper was published in 2001 by Kevin McCabe, Daniel Houser, Lee Ryan, Vernon Smith and Theodore Trouard, all economics professors. A neuro-economics laboratory at Cal Tech, led by Colin F. Camerer, a math genius and now an economics professor, has assembled the foremost group of interdisciplinary researchers. Many of the early entrants, who have learned neurology as well as economics, continue to dominate the field.
   Not all of neuro-economics uses brain scans. Andrew W. Lo, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, applied polygraph-like techniques to securities traders to show that anxiety and fear affect market behavior. Measuring eye movements, which is easy and cheap, helps the researcher ascertain what is on a subject’s mind. Other researchers have opened up monkey skulls to measure individual neurons; monkey neurons fire in proportion to the amount and probability of rewards. But do most economists care? Skeptics question whether neuro-economics explains real-world phenomena.
   [A] discovered that our brains’ estimate of risk is done independently from that of return.
   [B] has recruited researchers with expertise on both neurology and economics.
   [C] is expert in both math and economics.
   [D] assessed the risk and return of a decision separately.
   [E] studied the emotional effect on economic behavior by other techniques than brain scans.
   [F] thinks people tend to take stupid risks when they are excited about prospective benefits.
   [G] believes brain resources are divided into different parts for competing functions.
Peter L. Bossaerts
选项
答案A
解析 Peter L．Bossaerts出现在第五段第二句。该句提到他发现的内容：大脑对风险和回报的评估是分开进行的。A项是对该句原文的同义表达，discovered对应原文的found，而our brains’estimate of risk和that of return是原文中brains assess risk and return的词性转换，independently则对应原文的separately。所以本题选A。
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