VT College of Science Magazine Annual 2014 | Page 13

and developing the literature in the theory. Most of the class hated
it, but I thought it was fascinating as each paper continued to build.
It was at that point I realized I wanted to do research.
“One of the first things I discovered was that Northwestern at the
time was one of the best places in the nation, and arguably the
world, to study game theory, so I stayed long enough to get my
Ph.D.,” she said.
As post-doctorate positions for economists are rare, maybe a dozen
in the world at any given time, Ball moved east to the Boston University business school, where she taught finance for three years
before taking a job at Virginia Tech.
“It’s kind of interesting in that I loved game theory as an undergraduate and my dissertation advisor was Roger Myerson, a Nobel Prizewinning economist, so I had gone to the right places and worked
with exactly the right people to study game theory, but then I decided that wasn’t what I wanted to do.”
Ball’s passion, as it turns out, involves behavioral economics, which
doesn’t rely on strict interpretations and assumptions about the
people involved in the way game theory does.
“The severe assumptions in game theory end up creating models of
people that don’t exist,” she said. “You end up with a model of what
the world would be like if we were all much smarter and more selfinterested than we are. But I’m interested in people, so behavior
economics is looking at things like people who believe in fairness. I
started doing experimental work in my dissertation and looked at
people playing games where they didn’t do anything close to what
game theory would expect them to do. Over the next several years
there were a number of people doing that work, and it’s led to the
development of either a branch of game theory, or its own specialty
– behavioral economics – where people care about more than just
their own money.”
Until about 2012, Ball was working almost exclusively with establishing behavioral regularities, which is something desired by
experimental behaviorists, but more recently her work has shifted
to neuro-economics and working with the Virginia Tech Carilion Research Institute.
“Neuro-economics is the most exciting new research technique in
this field, but it’s completely linked to behavioral economics. Before
doing a neuro-imaging study of the brain, you want to do a pilot
test and that looks like a behavioral study I might have done before.
It’s adding a new tool to the research.”

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Behavioral economists watch and observe what people
do and how they behave in strategic situations and where
there is something at stake. During research experiments,
participants learn the “rules of the game” and are paid
based on outcomes of the decisions they and their opponents or partners make. “You can think of poker as an
example,” Ball said. “We have the same kind of incentives,
so whatever people are doing they are doing for money. In
my current research, subjects are in a scanner and we’re
watching their brain activity while they play a strategic
game and try to earn as much money as they can.”
Like other parts of the body, more blood flows in the brain
to areas that are used more. Researchers watch the levels
of activation in different parts of the brain as subjects are
involved in decision-making or processing information,
and from that they are able to make neural correlations.
“It turns out there are a huge number of things this is useful for,” Ball
explained. “Understanding how the brain works is important, but
there are more specific questions as well. For instance, we are ap-

“I was out to find the truth
and that’s when I became
a scientist”
plying for a National Institutes of Health grant to help us better understand brain activation levels among people with autism. We’re
trying to tease out more about how people who have autism do not
understand what other people are thinking or doing or telling them.”
In addition, Ball works with clinical psychologists on studies of addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, and anxiety. “There are definite relationships to what psychologists do every day and trying to
come up with better understandings of symptoms and brain activity,
and using that to inform better treatments,” she said. “Neuro-economics is currently informing mental health treatments, marketing
strategies, and criminal justice policy, so we need to keep doing basic science in this field here at Virginia Tech.”
Studying the brain is a long way from raising chickens and milking
cows, but as Ball is discovering, the opportunities are continuous
and evolving and she’s relishing every new twist in her search for
the truth.

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