Disturbance modifies payoffs in the explore-exploit trade-off.

ABSTRACT: Decision-making agents face a fundamental trade-off between exploring new opportunities with risky outcomes versus exploiting familiar options with more certain but potentially suboptimal outcomes. Although mediation of this trade-off is essential to adaptive behavior and has for decades been assumed to modulate performance, the empirical consequences of human exploratory strategies are unknown beyond laboratory or theoretical settings. Leveraging 540,000 vessel position records from 2494 commercial fishing trips along with corresponding revenues, here we find that during undisturbed conditions, there was no relationship between exploration and performance, contrary to theoretical predictions. However, during a major disturbance event which closed the most-utilized fishing grounds, explore

SUBMITTER: O'Farrell S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6662700 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature