Thirst-dependent risk preferences in monkeys identify a primitive form of wealth.

ABSTRACT: Experimental economic techniques have been widely used to evaluate human risk attitudes, but how these measured attitudes relate to overall individual wealth levels is unclear. Previous noneconomic work has addressed this uncertainty in animals by asking the following: (i) Do our close evolutionary relatives share both our risk attitudes and our degree of economic rationality? And (ii) how does the amount of food or water one holds (a nonpecuniary form of "wealth") alter risk attitudes in these choosers? Unfortunately, existing noneconomic studies have provided conflicting insights from an economic point of view. We therefore used standard techniques from human experimental economics to measure monkey risk attitudes for water rewards as a function of blood osmolality (an objective measure

SUBMITTER: Yamada H 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3785724 | biostudies-literature | 2013 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature