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Anticipation and choice heuristics in the dynamic consumption of pain relief
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Story, Giles W., Vlaev, Ivo, Dayan, Peter, Seymour, Ben, Darzi, Ara and Dolan, Raymond (2015) Anticipation and choice heuristics in the dynamic consumption of pain relief. PLoS Computational Biology, 11 (3). pp. 1-32. e1004030. doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004030 ISSN 1553-7358.
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004030
Abstract
Humans frequently need to allocate resources across multiple time-steps. Economic theory proposes that subjects do so according to a stable set of intertemporal preferences, but the computational demands of such decisions encourage the use of formally less competent heuristics. Few empirical studies have examined dynamic resource allocation decisions systematically. Here we conducted an experiment involving the dynamic consumption over approximately 15 minutes of a limited budget of relief from moderately painful stimuli. We had previously elicited the participants’ time preferences for the same painful stimuli in one-off choices, allowing us to assess self-consistency. Participants exhibited three characteristic behaviors: saving relief until the end, spreading relief across time, and early spending, of which the last was markedly less prominent. The likelihood that behavior was heuristic rather than normative is suggested by the weak correspondence between one-off and dynamic choices. We show that the consumption choices are consistent with a combination of simple heuristics involving early-spending, spreading or saving of relief until the end, with subjects predominantly exhibiting the last two.
Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
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Subjects: | R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine | ||||||||
Divisions: | Faculty of Social Sciences > Warwick Business School > Behavioural Science Faculty of Social Sciences > Warwick Business School |
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Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Decision making, Pain, Resource allocation | ||||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | PLoS Computational Biology | ||||||||
Publisher: | Public Library of Science | ||||||||
ISSN: | 1553-7358 | ||||||||
Official Date: | 20 March 2015 | ||||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 11 | ||||||||
Number: | 3 | ||||||||
Number of Pages: | 32 | ||||||||
Page Range: | pp. 1-32 | ||||||||
Article Number: | e1004030 | ||||||||
DOI: | 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004030 | ||||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Open Access (Creative Commons) | ||||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 29 December 2015 | ||||||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 29 December 2015 | ||||||||
Funder: | Wellcome Trust (London, England) | ||||||||
Grant number: | 098362/Z/12/Z (WT), 091593/Z/10/Z (WT) |
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