Here’s the second paper with NeuroMI affiliation. It’s also the first step of a new collaboration between neuroscientists and economists at Università degli Studi di Milano Bicocca.

“In an economic interplay in which the outcome is subjected to others’ choices, our endowment may increase or decrease for an active choice of our confederate or for his/her maintenance of the status quo. The experiment by Pisoni and collaborators investigated whether motor facilitation (an increment of motor cortex excitability due to action observation) may reflect the meaning of these simple economic exchanges. They found that more than economic fairness or unfairness per se, motor facilitation increases after status quo overcoming, possibly reflecting a neurophysiological signature of a potential change in the environemntal conditions.”

Alberto Pisoni, Emanuele Lo Gerfo, Stefania Ottone, Ferruccio Ponzano, Luca Zarri, Alessandra Vergallito, Leonor Josefina Romero Lauro. Fair play doesn’t matter: MEP modulation as a neurophysiological signature of status quo bias in economic interactions, NeuroImage, Volume 101, 1 November 2014, Pages 150-158