Some Work and Some Play: Microscopic and Macroscopic Approaches to Labor and Leisure: e1003894

Given the option, humans and other animals elect to distribute their time between work and leisure, rather than choosing all of one and none of the other. Traditional accounts of partial allocation have characterised behavior on a macroscopic timescale, reporting and studying the mean times spent in...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PLoS computational biology 2014-12, Vol.10 (12)
Main Authors: Niyogi, Ritwik K, Shizgal, Peter, Dayan, Peter
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Behavior
Charitable foundations
Decision making
Leisure
Psychology
Topography
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:Given the option, humans and other animals elect to distribute their time between work and leisure, rather than choosing all of one and none of the other. Traditional accounts of partial allocation have characterised behavior on a macroscopic timescale, reporting and studying the mean times spent in work or leisure. However, averaging over the more microscopic processes that govern choices is known to pose tricky theoretical problems, and also eschews any possibility of direct contact with the neural computations involved. We develop a microscopic framework, formalized as a semi-Markov decision process with possibly stochastic choices, in which subjects approximately maximise their expected returns by making momentary commitments to one or other activity. We show macroscopic utilities that arise from microscopic ones, and demonstrate how facets such as imperfect substitutability can arise in a more straightforward microscopic manner.
ISSN:1553-734X
1553-7358
DOI:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003894