A battle wages in your brain every time you are out shopping. A new research says specific areas in the brain seem to weigh the pleasure of buying against the pain of spending when people are deciding whether or not to go for the bargain, reports WebMD.

A team of researchers consisting of psychologist Brian Knutson of Stanford University; economist George Loewenstein of Carnegie Mellon University; and Drazen Prelec of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management, report their finding in the January issue of Neuron.

The findings defy an economic theory that purchasing decisions are a trade-off between current pleasure (buying something now) and future pleasure (buying something else later), Loewenstein says.

"We suspected that that's not the way the brain solves the problem of how much to spend," Loewenstein says.