Review
Does the brain calculate value?

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How do people choose between options? At one extreme, the ‘value-first’ view is that the brain computes the value of different options and simply favours options with higher values. An intermediate position, taken by many psychological models of judgment and decision making, is that values are computed but that the resulting choices depend heavily on the context of available options. At the other extreme, the ‘comparison-only’ view argues that choice depends directly on comparisons, with or even without any intermediate computation of value. In this paper, we place past and current psychological and neuroscientific theories on this spectrum, and review empirical data that have led to an increasing focus on comparison rather than value as the driver of choice.

Section snippets

Value-based vs. comparison-based theories of choice

How does the brain help us decide between going to a movie or the theatre; renting or buying a house; or undergoing risky but potentially life-transforming surgery? One type of theory holds that the brain computes the value of each available option 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Most theories of this type represent values by real numbers 6, 7, 8, 9; and such numbers might be represented in, for example, the activity of a population of neurons [10]. The values are then fed into a decision process where options

TYPE I: Value-first decision making

Theories of how brains do make decisions frequently derive from economic theories of how decisions should be made. In the classical version of this theory, ‘expected utility theory’ (EUT) [1], each option can be associated with a numerical value indicating its ‘utility’. The optimal decision maker then chooses the option with the maximum utility; or, if the outcome is probabilistic, the option with the maximum ‘expected’ utility; or, if the outcome is delayed, the outcome with the maximum

Type II: Comparison-based decision making with value computation

Decision theories classified as Type II still assume scales for utility: attributes have scale-based values that can be compared on an interval scale (i.e., the comparisons are better than ordinal). These models are based on comparison to allow for context effects both at the level of whole prospects and at the level of attributes. Thus, such models accommodate effects of context in a variety of ways. In economics, for example, models of utility gained from income have increasingly acknowledged

Type III: Comparison-based decision making without value computation

The ‘comparison with scales’ models reviewed above retain the assumption that value – of either attributes or objects – is calculated and that the results inform choice. A third, more extreme, possibility is that the notion of stable internal scale values can be dispensed with and that comparison is the only operation involved. Thus, Type III theories are defined here to include models without scales that involve ordinal comparison only. That is, the perceptual system might be like a pan

Concluding remarks

Value-based theories of choice in neuroscience, psychology and economics require that people and animals can map options, or at least attributes of options, onto an internal scale representing their value. We referred to these as Type I approaches. What makes a value scale appealing is its ability to bridge across domains. However, there is some evidence to suggest that any independent value scale is unstable even within the same domain (Stewart, N. et al., unpublished manuscript), which

Acknowledgements

NS was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) grant RES-062-23-0952. GDAB was supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) grant RES-062-23-2462. The authors would like to thank Konstantinos Tsetsos and five anonymous reviewers for valuable comments and suggestions.

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