Human collective intelligence under dual exploration-exploitation dilemmas.

ABSTRACT: The exploration-exploitation dilemma is a recurrent adaptive problem for humans as well as non-human animals. Given a fixed time/energy budget, every individual faces a fundamental trade-off between exploring for better resources and exploiting known resources to optimize overall performance under uncertainty. Colonies of eusocial insects are known to solve this dilemma successfully via evolved coordination mechanisms that function at the collective level. For humans and other non-eusocial species, however, this dilemma operates within individuals as well as between individuals, because group members may be motivated to take excessive advantage of others' exploratory findings through social learning. Thus, even though social learning can reduce collective exploration costs, the emergence o

SUBMITTER: Toyokawa W 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC3995913 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature