Economics of the community mechanism.

This paper discusses the importance of the community mechanism that complements the market and power mechanisms in an economic system during an era of crisis, defined as a mechanism for resource allocation by which at least one person proposes voluntary cooperation, and the proposal is not rejected. While this community mechanism can function alongside homo economicus in win-win situations, it can be further activated with social preferences for altruism and reciprocity and with norms or worldviews that encourage cooperation. Other factors that relate to these include the character strengths that contribute to community and society known as virtues, with the concept of wellbeing related to virtues being known as eudaimonia. Some aspects of the acquisition of virtues can be viewed as changing preferences, and there is empirical evidence suggesting changes in trust relate to changes in preferences. Leadership is an example of the virtue of justice, and servant leadership seems important for the community mechanism, as does perspective taking. For evaluating policies, normative economics based only on consequentialism may not be sufficient, and virtue ethics seems essential when the community mechanism is important.

Altered functional connectivity associated with time discounting in chronic pain.

Chronic pain (CP) is a global problem extensively associated with an unhealthy lifestyle. Time discounting (TD), a tendency to assign less value to future gains than to present gains, is an indicator of the unhealthy behaviors. While, recent neuroimaging studies implied overlapping neuro mechanisms underlying CP and TD, little is known about the specific relationship between CP and TD in behavior or neuroscience. As such, we investigated the association of TD with behavioral measures in CP and resting-state brain functional network in both CP patients and healthy subjects. Behaviorally, TD showed a significant correlation with meaningfulness in healthy subjects, whereas TD in patients only correlated with pain intensity. We identified a specific network including medial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC) in default mode network (DMN) associated with TD in healthy subjects that showed significant indirect mediation effect of meaningfulness on TD. In contrast, TD in patients was correlated with functional connectivity between dorsolateral PFC (DLPFC) and temporal lobe that mediated the effect of pain intensity on TD in patients. These results imply that TD is modulated by pain intensity in CP patients, and the brain function associated to TD is shifted from a medial to lateral representation within the frontal regions.