Abstract
The internal state of an organism affects its choices. Previous studies in various non-human animals have demonstrated a complex, and in some cases non-monotonic, interaction between internal state and risk preferences. Our aim was to examine the systematic effects of deprivation on human decision-making across various reward types. Using both a non-parametric approach and a classical economic analysis, we asked whether the risk attitudes of human subjects towards money, food and water rewards would change as a function of their internal metabolic state. Our findings replicate some previous work suggesting that, on average, humans become more risk tolerant in their monetary decisions, as they get hungry. However, our specific approach allowed us to make two novel observations about the complex interaction between internal state and risk preferences. First, we found that the change in risk attitude induced by food deprivation is a general phenomenon, affecting attitudes towards both monetary and consumable rewards. But much more importantly, our data indicate that rather than each subject becoming more risk tolerant as previously hypothesized based on averaging across subjects, we found that as a population of human subjects becomes food deprived the heterogeneity of their risk attitudes collapses towards a fixed point. Thus subjects who show high-risk aversion while satiated shift towards moderate risk aversion when deprived but subjects who are risk tolerant become more risk averse. These findings demonstrate a more complicated interaction between internal state and risk preferences and raise some interesting implications for both day-to-day decisions and financial market structures.
Highlights
Any animal that faces a changing environment needs to have the ability to acquire resources under variable environmental conditions and to structure their behavior in a way that makes efficient use of that variability
We determined how mild food and water deprivation alters risk attitudes towards food and water, a class of decisions widely studied in non-human animals but not in the Symmonds and colleagues study. This is of some relevance because we recently showed that the risk attitudes of individual human subjects to different reward types are highly correlated, the risk attitudes across subjects in that population were highly heterogeneous [12]
We examined whether there was a systematic change in choice behavior as a function of internal state in the representative agent
Summary
Any animal that faces a changing environment needs to have the ability to acquire resources under variable environmental conditions and to structure their behavior in a way that makes efficient use of that variability. Many have hypothesized that a subject’s response to a variable environment, if it is to be efficient, must include a modulation of risk attitudes by internal factors like food and water wealth or deprivation. Existing data is contested, with some data showing evidence of risk seeking under conditions or deprivation and other data showing just the opposite (for reviews see [4,6,10]). This suggests that both normative theoretical and empirical behavioral studies point toward complex non-linear relationships between risk attitude and deprivation state [2]
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