Individuals may differ systematically in their applied decision strategies, which has critical implications for decision neuroscience but is yet scarcely studied. Our study's main focus was therefore to investigate the neural mechanisms underlying compensatory versus noncompensatory strategies in risky choice. Here, we compared people using a compensatory expected value maximization with people using a simplified noncompensatory loss-minimizing choice strategy. To this end, we used a two-choice paradigm including a set of “simple”

Choosing between smaller prompt rewards and larger later rewards is a common choice problem, and studies widely agree that frontostriatal circuits heavily innervated by dopamine are centrally involved. Understanding how dopamine modulates intertemporal choice has important implications for neurobiological models and for understanding the mechanisms underlying maladaptive decision-making. However, the specific role of dopamine in intertemporal decisions is not well understood. Dopamine may play a role in multiple aspects of intertemporal choices—the valuation of choice outcomes and sensitivity to reward delays. To assess the role of dopamine in intertemporal decisions, we tested Parkinson disease patients who suffer from dopamine depletion in the striatum, in either high (on medication, PD ON ) or low (off medication, PD OFF ) dopaminergic states. Compared with both PD OFF and healthy controls, PD ON made more farsighted choices and reduced their valuations less as a function of increasing time to reward. Furthermore, reduced discounting in the high dopaminergic state was robust across multiple measures, providing new evidence for dopamine's role in making decisions about the future.