Effect of time on making decisions in an ultimatum game - application to medical ICT field

In clinical field, it is important for medical personnel, patients and their families to decide speedy and precisely, for the decisions affect efficiency of treatment and satisfaction for the treatment. And more importantly, sometimes, the decisions affect patient´s life. Thus, development of decision support system should be a primary topic in medical engineering field. In this study, effect of time in decision making was investigated as a step for the development of the system. In concrete, as a test of economic decision making, we conducted an ultimatum game experiment with a controlled length of time for making the decision. An ultimatum game is a game in which a reward is divided between two people. Previous work has established that people make economically irrational choices due to the effect of emotion in ultimatum games. We focused on the effect of the length of time given to make a decision in the game. The control of time length is new for the use of ultimatum games. This study verified the result of previous work on the effect of emotion in decision making and newly demonstrated the fact that the length of time taken to make a decision affects its result - a longer time-length leads to a more economically reasonable decision. This feature is assumed to be correlated to brain activity in the insula, the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex. And applicable to the medical ICT field.