Our lives consist of a constant stream of decisions and choices, ranging from the simple and everyday to complex questions such as whether to accept an offer to work abroad. Economists have built mathematical models of `optimal decisions’, but people rarely conform to these descriptions… Why do we buy expensive gym memberships only to skip our class and spend the evening in front of the TV? Why do people seem to choose what is not `best’ for them?

Decision-making has become a hot topic in many disciplines, and researchers have started to develop more realistic models that take into account all kinds of information, such as people’s beliefs and preferences, how they interact in social groups, and limitations in their reasoning abilities.

We will convey recent progress in using these mathematical models to understand the components of decision-making, and make predictions about how they interact in different contexts. We will also illustrate how matching up components of the models to different brain regions helps us to understand the neural processing that underlies decision-making, and how it can go wrong in psychological disorders and disease.