TRANSDIAGNOSTIC GENE–ENVIRONMENT NEUROECONOMICS: FROM ARBITRARY BEHAVIORAL LABELS TO BIOLOGICALLY ANCHORED CONSTRUCTS

Since the mid-twentieth century, the discipline of economics has undertaken a progressive effort to reconcile the formal elegance of theoretical models with the empirical complexity of human behavior. This trajectory has evolved from Friedman’s formulation of “as-if” rationality, in which the predictive power of models was privileged over their psychological plausibility, to Simon’s concept of bounded rationality, which underscored the structural and cognitive constraints inherent to decision-making, and subsequently to Kahneman and Tversky’s demonstration that departures from rational choice occur in systematic and predictable ways. More recent decades have witnessed substantial interdisciplinary advances: neuroeconomics has elucidated the neural circuits underpinning decision-making processes, behavioral genetics has established that both cognitive and non-cognitive traits are partly structured by common genetic variation, and psychiatry has advanced toward transdiagnostic and dimensional paradigms, as exemplified by frameworks such as RDoC and HiTOP. Building upon these convergent developments, the present article advances the concept of a Transdiagnostic Gene–Environment Neuroeconomics, conceived as an integrative framework in which behavioral constructs are operationalized in quantifiable terms, anchored in specific neural systems, and traceable to polygenic influences. Such an approach enables a more refined characterization of interindividual variability in decision-making and its potential reverberations within macroeconomic dynamics.