UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- Insurance research focuses heavily on risk, particularly on the choices people make and why. So when Lisa Posey, associate professor of business administration at the Penn State Smeal College of Business, wanted to investigate risk and its relationship to certain genetic markers in the brain, she came to the college’s Laboratory for Economics, Management and Auctions (LEMA).
The LEMA lab, directed by Associate Professor of Business Economics Anthony Kwasnica, is a dedicated computer lab for experimental economics projects that provides a controlled environment to help researchers understand why people make certain decisions.
“In the real world, we don’t always know why people do what they do,” said Kwasnica. “The lab provides conditions for a controlled environment so we can better understand the decisions that are made.”
Kwasnica, a co-author on Posey’s recent paper, helped program the experiments she used in her study, “Heterogeneity in Decision-Making Under Risk: Dopamine, Genetics and Prospect Theory,” which aimed to investigate the correlations in risk-taking activity with variations in the subjects’ dopamine system—represented by the DAT1 gene variable.