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Purpose – This chapter addresses the nature, formalization, and neural bases of (affective) social ties and discusses the relevance of ties for health economics. A social tie is defined as an affective weight attached by an individual to the well-being of another individual (‘utility interdependence’). Ties can be positive or negative, and symmetric or asymmetric between individuals. Characteristic of a social tie, as conceived of here, is that it develops over time under the influence of interaction, in contrast with a trait like altruism. Moreover, a tie is not related to strategic behavior such as reputation formation but seen as generated by affective responses.

Methodology/approach – A formalization is presented together with some supportive evidence from behavioral experiments. This is followed by a discussion of related psychological constructs and the presentation of suggestive existing neural findings. To help prepare the grounds for a model-based neural analysis some speculations on the neural networks involved are provided, together with suggestions for future research.

Findings – Social ties are not only found to be important from an economic viewpoint, it is also shown that they can be modeled and related to neural substrates.

Originality/value of the chapter – By providing an overview of the economic research on social ties and connecting it with the broader behavioral and neuroeconomics literature, the chapter may contribute to the development of a neuroeconomics of social ties.

Neuroeconomics is the study of how the brain makes economic decisions. By its nature neuroeconomics studies the mechanisms of decision-making, assumed to be computational, in order to better understand the strategies people use and the choices that people make. The focus of this book is how neuroeconomics connects to health economics in a way that improves our understanding of health care and treatment decisions. This is natural for several reasons. First, the brain and the body are intimately connected to each other and the health of one depends on the other. Second, the health system is inherently about decisions. Decisions to stay healthy, decisions to diagnose illness, decisions to treat, decisions to invest in new treatments, decisions to insure, and decisions to pay. Finally, these decisions can be difficult, as the media's consistent attention to this area attests. In light of this, for this volume we chose to include chapters that review basic research on emotion or social preference that have direct relevance to decisions in health economics. We have also included chapters that refer more specifically to some aspect of people's health care or treatment decisions. In the following we indicate the chapters within each topic area. Although many chapters could arguably fit in multiple categories, we have listed each chapter only once and without particular order.