scholarly journals Parameter-dependent shift from rational to irrational decisions in mice

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan A. Schneider ◽  
Benjamin Ballintyn ◽  
Donald Katz ◽  
John Lisman ◽  
Hyun-Jae Pi
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Optimal Solution ◽  
Sunk Cost ◽  
Optimal Outcomes ◽  
Economic Choice ◽  
Economic Decision Making ◽  
Biological Substrates ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Parameter Dependent ◽  
Economic Choices

AbstractIn the classical view of economic choices, subjects make rational decisions evaluating the costs and benefits of options in order to maximize their overall income. Nonetheless, subjects often fail to reach optimal outcomes. The overt value of an option drives the direction of decisions, but covert factors such as emotion and sunk cost are thought to drive the observed deviations from optimality. Many questions remain to be answered as to 1) which contexts contribute the most to deviation from an optimal solution; and 2) the extent of these effects. In order to tackle these questions, we devised a decision-making task for mice, in which cost and benefit parameters could be independently and flexibly adjusted and for which a tractable optimal solution was known. Comparing mouse behavior with this optimal solution across parameter settings revealed that the factor most strongly contributing to suboptimality was the cost parameter. The quantification of sunk cost, a covert factor implicated in our task design, revealed it as another contributor to suboptimality. In one condition where the large reward option was particularly unattractive and the small reward cost was low, the sunk cost effect and the cost-led suboptimality almost vanished. In this regime and this regime only, mice could be viewed as close to rational. Taken together, our findings support a model whereby parallel neural circuits independently activate and modulate multiple valuation algorithms, and suggest that “rationality” is a task-specific construct even in mice.Significant StatementIrrational factors in economic decision-making often cause significant deviation from optimal outcomes. By devising a flexible economic choice behavior for mice and comparing their behavior with an optimal solution, we investigated overt and covert factors that contributed to suboptimal outcomes and quantified the deviation from optimality. This investigation identified regimes where mice could be viewed as rational or irrational depending upon the parameters in the same task. These findings may provide a platform to investigate biological substrates underlying rational and irrational decision factors.

scholarly journals Parametric shift from rational to irrational decisions in mice

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nathan A. Schneider ◽  
Benjamin Ballintyn ◽  
Donald Katz ◽  
John Lisman ◽  
Hyun-Jae Pi
Keyword(s):  
Large Reward ◽  
Small Reward ◽  
Optimal Solution ◽  
Task Design ◽  
Costs And Benefits ◽  
Sunk Cost ◽  
Classical View ◽  
Optimal Outcomes ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Economic Choices

AbstractIn the classical view of economic choices, subjects make rational decisions evaluating the costs and benefits of options in order to maximize their overall income. Nonetheless, subjects often fail to reach optimal outcomes. The overt value of an option drives the direction of decisions, but covert factors such as emotion and sensitivity to sunk cost are thought to drive the observed deviations from optimality. Many questions remain to be answered as to (1) which contexts contribute the most to deviation from an optimal solution; and (2) the extent of these effects. In order to tackle these questions, we devised a decision-making task for mice, in which cost and benefit parameters could be independently and flexibly adjusted and for which a tractable optimal solution was known. Comparing mouse behavior with this optimal solution across parameter settings revealed that the factor most strongly contributing to suboptimal performance was the cost parameter. The quantification of sensitivity to sunk cost, a covert factor implicated in our task design, revealed it as another contributor to reduced optimality. In one condition where the large reward option was particularly unattractive and the small reward cost was low, the sensitivity to sunk cost and the cost-led suboptimality almost vanished. In this regime and this regime only, mice could be viewed as close to rational (here, ‘rational’ refers to a state in which an animal makes decisions basing on objective valuation, not covert factors). Taken together, our results suggest that “rationality” is a task-specific construct even in mice.

Practitioner's View on the Future of Economic Decision-Making in Project Management

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 33-55
Author(s):  
Brian J. Galli
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Project Management ◽  
Future Trend ◽  
Team Size ◽  
Economic Decision ◽  
Economic Decisions ◽  
Economic Decision Making ◽  
The Future ◽  
Financial Decision ◽  
The Cost

As of now, the best means to plan for the future is project management because it has been proven effective in problem-solving and generating solutions. Few projects entail economic decision-making because of the cost factor, but the wrong decisions can be made because of the complications that come with making economic decisions. However, financial decision-making does not only entail gathering information and making decisions accordingly. The economy must be analyzed and the future economy must be estimated for any economic decisions to be viable. This study highlights the future trend, as well as the significance of economic decision-making within project management. Furthermore, it tests several factors: economic decision-making influence, creativity, risk profile, and the management team size for a successful project. Primarily, this study will assess how significant economic decision-making is in project management.

A Decision-Making Tool for the Optimization of Empty Containers' Return in the Liner Shipping: Optimization by Using the Genetic Algorithm

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 39-56
Author(s):  
Naima Belayachi ◽  
Fouzia Amrani ◽  
Karim Bouamrane
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Lower Cost ◽  
Optimal Solution ◽  
Maritime Transportation ◽  
Initial Population ◽  
Transportation Sector ◽  
Empty Containers ◽  
Feasible Solutions ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Decision Making Tool

This article describes how in the maritime transportation sector, containerization represents one of the most remarkable improvements. In fact, the different shipping companies provide great efforts, whose purpose is to reduce the cost of this transport. However, these companies are facing a problem of empty containers, which are not available at some ports of Maritime Transport Network (MTN) to meet the clients' demands. This problem is simply a consequence of the imbalance in the distribution of containers through the MTN due to the set of containers that do not return to the origin port. This work offers a decision-making tool to this problem by proposing an optimal return of empty containers. The proposed application is based on evolutionary heuristics. Its principle is to find an optimal solution from a set of several feasible solutions generated during an initial population in order to enable the search of empty containers at lower cost.

scholarly journals Visual fixation patterns during economic choice reflect covert valuation processes that emerge with learning

2019 ◽  
Vol 116 (45) ◽  
pp. 22795-22801 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean E. Cavanagh ◽  
W. M. Nishantha Malalasekera ◽  
Bruno Miranda ◽  
Laurence T. Hunt ◽  
Steven W. Kennerley
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Final Choice ◽  
Decision Systems ◽  
Economic Choice ◽  
Binary Choices ◽  
Visual Fixations ◽  
Economic Choices

Visual fixations play a vital role in decision making. Recent studies have demonstrated that the longer subjects fixate an option, the more likely they are to choose it. However, the role of evaluating stimuli covertly (i.e., without fixating them), and how covert evaluations determine where to subsequently fixate, remains relatively unexplored. Here, we trained monkeys to perform a decision-making task where they made binary choices between reward-predictive stimuli which were well-learned (“overtrained”), recently learned (“novel”), or a combination of both (“mixed”). Subjects were free to saccade around the screen and make a choice (via joystick response) at any time. Subjects rarely fixated both options, yet choice behavior was better explained by assuming the values of both stimuli governed choices. The first fixation latency was fast (∼150 ms) but, surprisingly, its direction was value-driven. This suggests covert evaluation of stimulus values prior to first saccade. This was particularly evident for overtrained stimuli. For novel stimuli, first fixations became increasingly value-driven throughout a behavioral session. However, this improvement lagged behind learning of accurate economic choices, suggesting separate processes governed their learning. Finally, mixed trials revealed a strong bias toward fixating the novel stimulus first but no bias toward choosing it. Our results suggest that the primate brain contains fast covert evaluation mechanisms for guiding fixations toward highly valuable and novel information. By employing such covert mechanisms, fixation behavior becomes dissociable from the value comparison processes that drive final choice. This implies that primates use separable decision systems for value-guided fixations and value-guided choice.

scholarly journals Covert valuation for information sampling and choice

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Lawrence Butler ◽  
Timothy H. Muller ◽  
Sebastijan Veselic ◽  
W.M. Nishantha Malalasekera ◽  
Laurence T Hunt ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Prefrontal Cortex ◽  
Peripheral Vision ◽  
Rhesus Macaques ◽  
Anterior Cingulate ◽  
Economic Choice ◽  
Simultaneous Processing ◽  
Economic Decision Making ◽  
Peripheral Cues ◽  
Information Sampling

We use our eyes to assess the value of objects around us and carefully fixate options that we are about to choose. Neurons in the prefrontal cortex reliably encode the value of fixated options, which is essential for decision making. Yet as a decision unfolds, it remains unclear how prefrontal regions determine which option should be fixated next. Here we show that anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) encodes the value of options in the periphery to guide subsequent fixations during economic choice. In an economic decision-making task involving four simultaneously presented cues, we found rhesus macaques evaluated cues using their peripheral vision. This served two distinct purposes: subjects were more likely to fixate valuable peripheral cues, and more likely to choose valuable options whose cues were never even fixated. ACC, orbitofrontal cortex, dorsolateral pre-frontal cortex, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex neurons all encoded cue value post-fixation. ACC was unique, however, in also encoding the value of cues before fixation and even cues that were never fixated. This pre-saccadic value encoding by ACC predicted which cue was next fixated during the decision process. ACC therefore conducts simultaneous processing of peripheral information to guide information sampling and choice during decision making.

scholarly journals Estimating Time Preferences from Convex Budgets

2012 ◽  
Vol 102 (7) ◽  
pp. 3333-3356 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Andreoni ◽  
Charles Sprenger
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Risk Aversion ◽  
Utility Function ◽  
Time Preferences ◽  
Economic Decision ◽  
Economic Decision Making ◽  
Measures Of Risk ◽  
High Utility ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Allocation Decisions

Experimentally elicited discount rates are frequently higher than what seems reasonable for economic decision-making. Such high rates are often attributed to present-biased discounting. A well-known bias of standard measurements is the assumption of linear consumption utility. Attempting to correct this bias using measures of risk aversion to identify concavity, researchers find reasonable discounting but at the cost of exceptionally high utility function curvature. We present a new methodology for identifying time preferences, both discounting and curvature, from simple allocation decisions. We find reasonable levels of both discounting and curvature and, surprisingly, dynamically consistent time preferences. (JEL C91, D12, D81)

Managing replacement and culling in dairy herds

2021 ◽  
pp. 299-320
Author(s):  
Albert De Vries ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Risk Factors ◽  
Decision Making ◽  
Dairy Cows ◽  
Environmental Sustainability ◽  
Dairy Herds ◽  
Economic Decision ◽  
Economic Decision Making ◽  
Replacement Decisions ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Economic Considerations

Approximately one third of dairy cows are replaced every year. Replacement of dairy cattle is an important part of the cost of dairy production and an environmental sustainability concern. Primary culling reasons are reduced health and fertility. Reduced welfare often proceeds culling. This chapter focuses on factors that affect replacement and culling in dairy herds with a focus on cows. The act of culling is simple, but the risk factors and economic considerations are complex. The chapter first presents some data on culling risks and reasons, explores more in depth the effects of poor health on culling, and presents aspects of economic decision making regarding culling and replacement decisions.

A Decision-Making Tool for the Optimization of Empty Containers' Return in the Liner Shipping: Optimization by Using the Genetic Algorithm

2021 ◽  
pp. 1186-1206
Author(s):  
Naima Belayachi ◽  
Fouzia Amrani ◽  
Karim Bouamrane
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Optimal Solution ◽  
Maritime Transportation ◽  
Initial Population ◽  
Maritime Transport ◽  
Transportation Sector ◽  
Empty Containers ◽  
Feasible Solutions ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Decision Making Tool

This article describes how in the maritime transportation sector, containerization represents one of the most remarkable improvements. In fact, the different shipping companies provide great efforts, whose purpose is to reduce the cost of this transport. However, these companies are facing a problem of empty containers, which are not available at some ports of Maritime Transport Network (MTN) to meet the clients' demands. This problem is simply a consequence of the imbalance in the distribution of containers through the MTN due to the set of containers that do not return to the origin port. This work offers a decision-making tool to this problem by proposing an optimal return of empty containers. The proposed application is based on evolutionary heuristics. Its principle is to find an optimal solution from a set of several feasible solutions generated during an initial population in order to enable the search of empty containers at lower cost.

scholarly journals Selecting Optimal Pedestrian Crossing Using Multi-criteria Decision-making

2012 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 105-116 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ljupko Šimunović ◽  
Ivan Grgurević ◽  
Jasmina Pašagić Škrinjar
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Optimal Solution ◽  
Multi Criteria Decision Making ◽  
Rational Analysis ◽  
Safety Level ◽  
Persons With Disabilities ◽  
The Road ◽  
Pedestrian Crossing ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Selection Methodology

Pedestrian crossings are the critical points in the traffic network that need to enable pedestrians to safely cross the road. The safety level depends on the type of pedestrian crossing. The differences between individual types of pedestrian crossings can be noted also in relation to other criteria such as the price, energy, environmental impact, accessibility, etc. Besides, various groups of users assess the quality service differently, even when this refers to the same type of pedestrian crossing. Therefore, optimal solution of a pedestrian crossing has to be selected based on a comprehensive and rational analysis and application of adequate software tools. The selection methodology of an optimal pedestrian crossing is defined using a multi-criteria analysis. In order to view the problem as a whole, four scenarios of evaluating alternatives are foreseen. Four different groups of stakeholders: traffic experts, investors, groups of persons with disabilities and healthy persons (persons not included in the previous three stakeholder groups), who use a pedestrian crossing (according to different age, disability, perception of personal safety, etc.), assessed the importance of the offered criteria. Different groups of users have different preferences in relation to individual groups of criteria, depending on their interests and needs. One group finds the criterion of pedestrian safety the most important one, others think that finances are most important (the cost of construction), some think that accessibility is the most important issue, etc. The solutions obtained in this manner provide insight into the advantages and drawbacks of individual versions. This makes it easier for the decision-makers to select only one variant / alternative from a group of the offered solutions in compliance with the defined criteria and sub-criteria with the aim of defining an optimal pedestrian crossing for a certain spatial and traffic location. KEY WORDS: pedestrian crossing, multi-criteria decision-making, analytical hierarchy process

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