Abstract
Most research on risk aversion in behavioral science with human subjects has focused on a component of risk aversion that does not adapt itself to context. More recently, studies have explored risk aversion adaptation to changing circumstances in sequential decision-making tasks. It is an open question whether one can identify evidence, at the single subject level, for such risk aversion adaptation. We conducted a behavioral experiment on human subjects, using a sequential decision making task. We developed a model-based approach for estimating the adaptation of risk-taking behavior with single-trial resolution by modeling a subject's goals and internal representation of task contingencies. Using this model-based approach, we estimated the subject-specific adaptation of risk aversion depending on the current task context. We found striking inter-subject variations in the adaptation of risk-taking behavior. We show that these differences can be explained by differences in subjects' internal representations of task contingencies and goals. We discuss that the proposed approach can be adapted to a wide range of experimental paradigms and be used to analyze behavioral measures other than risk aversion.
Highlights
It is typically assumed that humans, as well as other animals, prefer courses of action free of risk and uncertainty; e.g., when foraging for food, easier and safer patches are preferred (Kacelnik and Bateson, 1996; Myerson et al, 2003)
Animal or human subjects are placed in environments, or presented with tasks, in which a sequence of decisions must be made in order to reach an overarching goal
We found that the introduction of the subject-specific maximum decision modifier (MDM) significantly improved model fit ( Bayesian information criterion (BIC) > 100)
Summary
It is typically assumed that humans, as well as other animals, prefer courses of action free of risk and uncertainty; e.g., when foraging for food, easier and safer patches are preferred (Kacelnik and Bateson, 1996; Myerson et al, 2003). This safety-seeking behavior is highly contextual: In many situations, the course of action with the least risk or least uncertainty is not the one that can best fulfill the current goals. While much research has been conducted on these dynamic context effects in animal behavior (Caraco et al, 1980, 1990; Cartar and Dill, 1990; Kacelnik and Bateson, 1996) and in anthropology and related fields (Winterhalder and Smith, 2000), relatively few studies seem to have explored the same themes in human subjects (Kolling et al, 2012; Mobbs et al, 2013; Houston et al, 2014)
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