Neuroeconomics, Second Edition: Decision Making and the Brain 2nd Edition

I bought this book through amazon.com on June 28, 2014, about 5 months ago [for $58.39]. It is everything its team of editors, the 43 authors of its 27 articles, and its multiple publishers say it is.

The book’s greatest strengths.

It is THE definitive, THE most up to date book on the fast-emerging field of neuroeconomics.

It is meaty. It contains a large number of excellent illustrations that expand the text surrounding it. They are full color, very detailed, summarized, and are annotated as to source. Very strong here.

After every chapter there is an exhaustive list of sources and references that is priceless for other researchers and students.
Since the field of neuroeconomics is so new, circa 1990 or so, it does not qualify for “discipline” status yet. These bibliographical lists contain many of the seminal sources for the primogenitors of neuroeconomics, economics, psychology, and biology. That list is not exhaustive, but it does help you understand the biases and gaps that guided the authors’ research and influenced their point of view. Very telling.

It is hefty in wright and content. It may cost the least per pound of any book on amazon.com. If you get through it completely, then you can then buy the other 100 or so books this one subsumes.

Now the greatest weaknesses. However, you should be forewarned about a few attributes that you have to adjust to get full value from this book.

I bought it to read it for a Coursera course I was taking. I quickly discovered it is not the type of book you “read” from beginning to end or even ever finish reading. It is a massive, dense, engaging read. I barely go through the introductory chapter on the History of Neuroeconomics and the 7 chapters in Part 1, The Fundamental Tools of Neuroeconomics -- the first 125 pages or so-- before the 8-week class was over. However, I learned much more from the book than from the course and it hooked me on wanting to read more.

Everyone in the list in the first paragraph is overly eager to point out repeatedly – and tellingly -- that the field of neuroeconomics is relatively new and rapidly growing confederation of researchers from the long established disciplines of economics, psychology, and biology, with a touch of anthropology thrown in.

This book’s greatest weakness is that it reads like an encyclopedia. Its greatest strength is that it IS an encyclopedia. The editors state that their goal was to produce a textbook. They overshot that moon. In order to be a textbook, it needs some learning tools, like review questions, suggested exercises, gedankenexperiments, etc.

This “textbook” relies solely on its organization as its major pedagogical tool. It is organized into 5 sections, each with 3 to 7 chapters. There is an order to this thread, but you only perceive it after you have read at least half the book. I found myself skipping around from chapter to chapter to pursue specific topics that interested me.

The Index was not as helpful as I needed it to be to facilitate my tracing the topics I pursued across the 27 chapters where the information I sought was buried. This is one area that could be greatly improved.

One wild tangent here. Has anyone noticed how useless most indices are these days? I think they are compiled by computers that search only for keywords that are incapable of spotting key ideas, key references, and themes in a complete sentence that provide the substance of most learning. I found myself writing in over 100 key ideas missing from the index. Pardon this rant on the publishing industry.

It is laden with scientific elitism, self-promotion, condescension, and “attitude,” terms of art, jargon, etc. You have to can get past the “academic attitude” that detracts from the simple grace of scholarship.

NET: If you are interested in neuroeconomics – for any reason – this is THE source you should “read” first, or have it handy for reference, or display it as a talisman or to anyone you encounter that you want to impress. Don’t’ worry about anyone calling your bluff, most will not be able to lift it.

This could have been an excellent text book on this possibly growing subject but the vast number of typos, many that have caused me confusion as someone new to this subject, make the otherwise excellent info (dense and challenging) very difficult to understand. Did they mean dlFPC or dlPFC? Probably the later, but why did I need to spend time trying to figure this out.

Glimcher is far too good for this work.

This is an outstanding sourcebook. Excellent set of chapter authors, and really well thought out division of chapter topics that complement and reinforce each other. Very up-to-date (except that in this field, by the time you are in print you are inevitably out-of-date already). I particularly liked that there was very little cheerleading about "how important this approach will be" -- just a focus on the developing science.

Very well written with research paper review