036-22 – Economic value in the Brain: An Activation Likelihood Estimation Meta-Analysis of Willingness-to-pay

Forming and comparing subjective values of choice options is a critical stage of decision making. Previous literature has highlighted a complex network of brain regions involved in this process by utilising a wide variety of tasks and stimuli, varying in economic, hedonic and sensory qualities. To identify the core brain valuation system that processes economic value, we conducted a coordinate-based activation likelihood estimation meta-analysis of fMRI studies that employed the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak (BDM) auction, an incentivised demand-revealing mechanism which quantifies economic value of stimuli as willingness-to-pay (WTP). The systematic review revealed twenty-four studies (731 participants; 190 foci). Using two additional contrast analyses, we also investigated whether this encoding of subjective value would be invariant to the synchrony of auction task and fMRI recordings, and types of stimuli (food vs. non-food).
WTP positively correlated with fMRI-BOLD activations in the bilateral ventral striatum, right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, right inferior frontal gyrus, and in the left ventromedial prefrontal cortex with a sub-cluster reaching into the anterior cingulate cortex. Contrast analysis revealed no difference in brain activation patterns between outside vs inside scanner BDMs, or between food vs non-food stimuli. Our findings offer succinct empirical support for the core structures responsible for the formation of economic value, irrespective of the type, quality or quantity of item. The results also suggest that this economic valuation is an automatic process, as the activation patterns were not affected by when and where the BDM was completed and are therefore unaffected by task relevancy.