PREF LEARNHEUR · Learning heuristics in preference elicitation tasks: insights from behavioural, computational and neurobiological investigations
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2015-05-01 → 2017-04-30
- EU contribution
- €165,599
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF
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Results in brief
Learning heuristics in preference elicitation tasks: insights from behavioural, computational and neurobiological investigations
Decision theory assumes that in order to make a choice, individuals attribute values to available options, compare those values and select the option with the highest. In behavioral economics, the values attributed to options presumably integrate individuals’ attitude (or preference) toward risk, ambiguity, or delay. Hence, in order to estimate, e.g. individuals’ attitude toward risk, the classical strategy is to offer succession of binary choices between risky lotteries, and estimate how people “value” gains and probabilities. However, the succession of choices faced by individuals during those classical “preference elicitation” tasks might trigger the emergence of additional strategies and heuristics, implemented to perform those tasks in a fast, yet adaptive manner. Then, instead of computing complex values for available options, individual might learn to apply simple rules, such as: “focus on the probabilities –i.e. ignore information about potential gains- and choose the safe option.” This project aimed at investigating the development of such heuristic, from a behavioral, computational and neural perspective. Estimating individuals’ preferences has become crucial in many different fields: in social sciences, where it constitutes the micro-economic basis of macro-economic models and policies; in clinical sciences, where preferences are increasingly used as diagnostic tools, e.g. in neuro-psychiatry; in neurosciences, where preferences are used as an important variable to investigate the neural computations at stake in decision-making. Understanding if and when people change strategies during preference elicitation tasks –e.g. by implementing heuristic rules rather than following the canonical “value-based” strategy–can help to refine preference elicitation, hence can have a significant impact in society. The objective are 1) Capturing, behaviorally, the emergence of heuristics in a widely-used instantiation of binary economic choices task, 2) Modelling this emergence, using a computational model 3) Exploring its neural implementation in humans.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Although decision theory assumes that when making a choice, individuals attribute values to available options, compare those values and select the option with the highest, the succession of choices faced during classical preference elicitation tasks might trigger the emergence of additional heuristics, implemented to perform those tasks in a fast, yet adaptive manner. This project aim at pioneering the isolation of such heuristic development, in a dynamical framework where both the task features and the agents’ own preferences are learned from previous trials, and influence subsequent behavior. This framework suggests that agents’ preferences will depend on the choice sequence, thus vary according to predictable patterns through different instantiations of the same task. Thereby, it captures a new component of individual preferences, which we refer to as task-related preferences. Combining behavioral experiments, computational modelling and functional brain imaging, we propose to reveal and measure the behavioral variance accounted by the task-related preferences, to model their emergence during the task, and to incorporate them in a coherent neuro-cognitive model of decision-making. Overall, this project will contribute to 1) refine current neurocognitive and economic models of decision-making, 2) train a promising cognitive neuroscientist to tackle human decision issues relevant to social sciences, with advanced quantitative economic/computational tools, and 3) foster fruitful cross-talks between scholars from economics, psychology, and neuroscience at the host institution. The scientific contribution seems particularly important given that preferences are one of the current conceptual cornerstones used to understand our society at the micro- and macroeconomic level, to guide and assess public policies aiming to maximize people’s well-being, to characterize normal and pathological behaviors, and to unravel the neurobiological mechanisms underlying decision-making.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM · AmsterdamCoordinatorNetherlands
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union