ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Optimal decision making and matching are tied through diminishing returns.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Environmental dynamics impact whether matching is optimal.PNAS nexus · 2026Article
- Improving policy design and epidemic response using integrated models of economic choice and disease dynamics with behavioral feedback.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Reconciling Signal-Detection Models of Criterion Learning with the Generalized Matching Law.Computational brain & behavior · 2025Article
- Distinct neural computations scale the violation of expected reward and emotion in social transgressions.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Matching provides efficient decisions.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Developmental feedbacks and the emergence of individuality.Royal Society open science · 2022Article
- Reward foraging task and model-based analysis reveal how fruit flies learn value of available options.PloS one · 2020Article
- Optimal response vigor and choice under non-stationary outcome values.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2019Review
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Abstract
How individuals make decisions has been a matter of long-standing debate among economists and researchers in the life sciences. In economics, subjects are viewed as optimal decision makers who maximize their overall reward income. This framework has been widely influential, but requires a complete knowledge of the reward contingencies associated with a given choice situation. Psychologists and ecologists have observed that individuals tend to use a simpler "matching" strategy, distributing their behavior in proportion to relative rewards associated with their options. This article demonstrates that the two dominant frameworks of choice behavior are linked through the law of diminishing returns. The relatively simple matching can in fact provide maximal reward when the rewards associated with decision makers' options saturate with the invested effort. Such saturating relationships between reward and effort are hallmarks of the law of diminishing returns. Given the prevalence of diminishing returns in nature and social settings, this finding can explain why humans and animals so commonly behave according to the matching law. The article underscores the importance of the law of diminishing returns in choice behavior.
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