Funds from this grant support a pair of projects aimed at understanding the role that attention and inattention play in consumer behavior and decision-making. In the first, economist Nick Netzer of the University of Zurich will develop the beginnings of a theoretical framework that treats attention as a relatively-fixed resource that decision-makers allocate as they move through the world and make decisions. Netzer will work to incorporate insights from psychology and neuroscience into standard economic decision-making models, allowing a more nuanced, psychologically realistic account of how humans make decisions, one that has the potential to more gracefully explain common behavioral phenomena, like why decisions made in a rush or while multi-tasking tend to be non-optimal. In the second phase of the project, Netzer will partner with behavioral neuroscientist Phil Tobler to test his framework. Tobler has designed a series of experiments that aim to quantify how increases in subjects’ attentional resources, occasioned by the administration of low-dose attention-enhancing drugs, affect their performance on decision-making tasks. The experiments will be able to demonstrate whether increased attentional resources improve decision-making in the ways predicted by Netzer’s models.