Balancing Risk and Reward: Dopamine’s Central Role in Economic Decision-Making

Dopamine has been increasingly implicated in shaping economic and financial decision-making, yet much of the evidence remains fragmented across paradigms and mechanistic levels, and heavily based on preclinical or clinical populations. This review synthesises pharmacological, neuroimaging, and genetic findings from studies involving healthy human participants, highlighting dopamine’s role in risk-taking, delay discounting, social fairness, reward sensitivity, and feedback learning. It distinguishes between transient state-related effects and stable trait-level influences, and clarifies how dopaminergic tone, receptor subtype activity—particularly D2—and corticostriatal circuitry modulate economic choices. In doing so, the review advances a mechanism-focused framework for understanding adaptive and biased decision strategies.