scholarly journals Optimal use of simplified social information in sequential decision-making

2021 ◽  
Vol 18 (179) ◽  
pp. 20210082
Author(s):  
Richard P. Mann
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Optimal Policy ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Sequential Decision Making ◽  
Sequential Decision ◽  
Hybrid Strategy ◽  
Rational Agents ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Decision Making ◽  
Prior Decision

Social animals can improve their decisions by attending to those made by others. The benefit of this social information must be balanced against the costs of obtaining and processing it. Previous work has focused on rational agents that respond optimally to a sequence of prior decisions. However, full decision sequences are potentially costly to perceive and process. As such, animals may rely on simpler social information, which will affect the social behaviour they exhibit. Here, I derive the optimal policy for agents responding to simplified forms of social information. I show how the behaviour of agents attending to the aggregate number of previous choices differs from those attending to just the most recent prior decision, and I propose a hybrid strategy that provides a highly accurate approximation to the optimal policy with the full sequence. Finally, I analyse the evolutionary stability of each strategy, showing that the hybrid strategy dominates when cognitive costs are low but non-zero, while attending to the most recent decision is dominant when costs are high. These results show that agents can employ highly effective social decision-making rules without requiring unrealistic cognitive capacities, and indicate likely ecological variation in the social information different animals attend to.

scholarly journals Optimal use of simplified social information in sequential decision-making

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard P. Mann
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Optimal Policy ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Sequential Decision ◽  
Hybrid Strategy ◽  
Rational Agents ◽  
Full Sequence ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Social Decision Making

AbstractSocial animals can improve their decisions by attending to the choices made by others. The rewards gained by attending to this social information must be balanced against the costs of obtaining and processing it. Previous work has investigated the behaviour of rational agents that respond optimally to a full sequence of prior decisions. However, such full sequences are potentially difficult to perceive and costly to process. As such, real animals are likely to rely on simpler forms of information when making decisions, which in turn will affect the social behaviour they exhibit. In this paper I derive the optimal policy for rational agents responding to specific simplified forms of social information. I show how the behaviour of agents attending to the total aggregate number of previous choices differs from those attending to more dynamic information provided by the most recent prior decision, and I propose a hybrid strategy that incorporates both information sources to give a highly accurate approximation to the optimal policy with the full sequence. Finally I analyse the evolutionary stability of each strategy depending on the cost of cognition and perception, showing that a hybrid strategy dominates when this cost is low but non-zero, while attending to the most recent decision is dominant when costs are high. These results show that agents can employ highly effective social decision-making rules without requiring unrealistic cognitive capacities, and point to likely ecological variation in the social information different animals attend to.

scholarly journals Social Influence Undermines the Wisdom of the Crowd in Sequential Decision Making

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincenz Frey ◽  
Arnout van de Rijt
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Experimental Studies ◽  
Decision Makers ◽  
Sequential Decision Making ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Central Tendency ◽  
Sequential Decision ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Positive Effect

Teams, juries, electorates, and committees must often select from various alternative courses of action what they judge to be the best option. The phenomenon that the central tendency of many independent estimates is often quite accurate—“the wisdom of the crowd”—suggests that group decisions based on plurality voting can be surprisingly wise. Recent experimental studies demonstrate that the wisdom of the crowd is further enhanced if individuals have the opportunity to revise their votes in response to the independent votes of others. We argue that this positive effect of social information turns negative if group members do not first contribute an independent vote but instead cast their votes sequentially such that early mistakes can cascade across strings of decision makers. Results from a laboratory experiment confirm that when subjects sequentially state which of two answers they deem correct, majorities are more often wrong when subjects can see how often the two answers have been chosen by previous subjects than when they cannot. As predicted by our theoretical model, this happens even though subjects’ use of social information improves the accuracy of their individual votes. A second experiment conducted over the internet involving larger groups indicates that although early mistakes on easy tasks are eventually corrected in long enough choice sequences, for difficult tasks wrong majorities perpetuate themselves, showing no tendency to self-correct. This paper was accepted by Yuval Rottenstreich, decision analysis.

scholarly journals Sources of suboptimality in a minimalistic explore-exploit task

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mingyu Song ◽  
Zahy Bnaya ◽  
Wei Ji Ma
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Optimal Policy ◽  
Fundamental Aspect ◽  
Sequential Decision Making ◽  
Sequential Decision ◽  
Exploration And Exploitation ◽  
New Perspective

Balancing exploration and exploitation is a fundamental aspect of decision-making. It remains unknown whether people are close to optimal in striking this balance, and if not, how exactly their behavior deviates from optimality. Many existing paradigms are not ideally suited to answer this question, as they contain complexities such as non-stationary environments, stochasticity under exploitation, and reward distributions that are unknown to participants. Here, we introduce a task without such complexities, in which the optimal policy is to start off exploring and to switch to exploitation at most once in each sequence of decisions. The behavior of 49 laboratory and 143 online participants deviated both qualitatively and quantitatively from the optimal policy, even when allowing for bias and decision noise. Instead, people seem to follow a suboptimal rule in which they switch from exploration to exploitation when the highest reward so far exceeds a certain threshold. Moreover, we show that this threshold decreases approximately linearly with the proportion of the sequence that remains, suggesting a novel temporal ratio law. Finally, we find evidence for “sequence-level” variability which is shared across all decisions in the same sequence. Our results provide a new perspective on the explore-exploit dilemma, and emphasize the importance of examining sequence-level strategies and their variability when studying sequential decision-making.

scholarly journals Frequency-dependent payoffs and sequential decision-making favour consistent tactic use

2012 ◽  
Vol 279 (1735) ◽  
pp. 1977-1985 ◽  
Author(s):  
Frédérique Dubois ◽  
Luc-Alain Giraldeau ◽  
Denis Réale
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Information Use ◽  
Sequential Decision Making ◽  
Sequential Decision ◽  
Frequency Dependent ◽  
Foraging Area ◽  
Social Information Use ◽  
Types Of Information ◽  
Sequential Frequency

Although natural selection should have favoured individuals capable of adjusting the weight they give to personal and social information according to circumstances, individuals generally differ consistently in their individual weighting of both types of information. Such individual differences are correlated with personality traits, suggesting that personality could directly affect individuals’ ability to collect personal or social information. Alternatively, the link between personality and information use could simply emerge as a by-product of the sequential decision-making process in a frequency-dependent context. Indeed, when the gains associated with behavioural options depend on the choices of others, an individual's sequence of arrival could constrain its choice of options leading to the emergence of correlated behaviours. Any factor such as personality that affects decision order could thus be correlated with information use. To test this new explanation, we developed an individual-based model that simulates a group of animals engaged in a game of sequential frequency-dependent decision: a producer–scrounger game. Our results confirm that the sequence of decision, in this case enforced by the order in which animals enter a foraging area, consistently influences their mean tactic use and their individual plasticity, an outcome reminiscent of the correlation reported between personality and social information use.

Human and Optimal Valuation in a Sequential Decision-Making Task With Uncertainty

2007 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kyler M. Eastman ◽  
Brian J. Stankiewicz ◽  
Alex C. Huk
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Sequential Decision Making ◽  
Sequential Decision
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