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, explorers benefited significantly from less-impacted revenues and were also more likely to continue fishing. We conclude that in stochastic natural systems characterized by non-stationary rewards, the role of exploration in buffering against disturbance may be greater than previously thought in humans.
Highlights
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
Progress has been made in relaxing the assumption of reward stationarity[12], investigation of explore/exploit trade-off (EETO) in the lab remains a profoundly different decisionmaking setting from the natural systems to which the human EETO-mediating apparatus is adapted[5,13]
After controlling for inter-vessel differences in length, activity, and spatial displacement resulting from the closure, we find that entropy and patch residence time (PRT), respectively, have positive and negative influences on ΔPi indicating that vessels with a history of more-exploratory EETO strategies experienced lessadverse impacts on performance during the disturbance
Summary
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 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. Natural systems are subject to ecological and environmental fluctuations which stochastically modify both the payoff probability of a given option, as well as the portfolio of available options. Under these circumstances, the consequences of operating at various positions along the continuum of EETO strategies remain untested
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