1 The role of intelligence in economic decision making Aldo Rustichini, Department of Economics, University of Minnesota Corresponding author: Aldo Rustichini Email: aldo.rustichini@gmail.com ; telephone: 1 612 6254816 fax: 1 612 624 0209 Abstract Research on the link between intelligence and economic decision making is a recent development in the more general attempt to introduce theories of individual differences and personality traits into the analysis of economic behavior. We lay down here what we know from behavioral studies, from imaging studies, both functional and anatomical, and insights from decision theory and game theory. All the results point to a correlation and perhaps a deeper link between cognition and decision making, both in single-player and in strategic environments. We see several pieces of a puzzle, and provide some suggestions on how future research will discover the hidden image. Introduction An operational way of defining intelligence [1] begins with the empirical observation that test scores on cognitive tasks are positively correlated. If one then looks for an explanation of this regularity through exploratory factor analysis, one finds that scores in specific tests can be explained in a satisfactory way by a general factor (which Spearman called g) and an independent, task-specific factor. These conclusions have long been controversial, but they seem to be now widely accepted [2]. We will focus here on g (and call it intelligence) as the measurable individual characteristic of performance in general cognitive processes. Economic decision making is the selection of one from a feasible set of options, each one having a value to the decision maker, and involves the processing of information on several relevant variables describing the options. This process is already complex in the case of an individual acting in isolation, as it requires an understanding of the options offered, whether at the supermarket or in the laboratory, an introspective evaluation of the prospective pleasure derived from each, perhaps on the basis of previous © 2015. This manuscript version is made available under the Elsevier user license http://www.elsevier.com/open-access/userlicense/1.0/