ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
Structured, uncertainty-driven exploration in real-world consumer choice.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 45 papers.
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Who cites it
45 citing papers in PubMed.
- Dopamine depletion in Parkinson's increases directed but not random exploration.Science advances · 2026Article
- Article
- Cognitive modeling of real-world behavior for understanding mental health.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2026Review
- Competing cognitive pressures on human exploration in the absence of trade-off with exploitation.Nature communications · 2026Article
- Human infants appreciate that information bears value for other individuals.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Whom do we prefer to learn from in observational reinforcement learning?PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- Signatures of reinforcement learning in natural behavior.Current directions in psychological science · 2025Article
- Different exploration strategies along the autism spectrum: diverging effects of autism diagnosis and autism traits.Molecular autism · 2025Article
- A nonlinear relationship between prediction errors and learning rates in human reinforcement-learning.PLoS computational biology · 2025Article
- How decoy options ferment choice biases in real-world consumer decision-making.NPJ science of learning · 2025Article
- Fluctuations in Sequential Many-Alternative Decisions Reveal Strategies Beyond Immediate Reward Maximisation.Journal of cognition · 2025Article
- Experience and advice consequences shape information sharing strategies.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Predecisional information search adaptively reduces three types of uncertainty.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- Wallets' explorations across non-fungible token collections.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Ecological brain: reframing the study of human behaviour and cognition.Royal Society open science · 2024Review
- Multiple and subject-specific roles of uncertainty in reward-guided decision-making.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2024Article
- Testing the convergent validity, domain generality, and temporal stability of selected measures of people's tendency to explore.Nature communications · 2024Article
- PET-measured human dopamine synthesis capacity and receptor availability predict trading rewards and time-costs during foraging.Nature communications · 2023Article
- Empowerment contributes to exploration behaviour in a creative video game.Nature human behaviour · 2023Article
- Understanding the first-offer conundrum: How buyer offers impact sale price and impasse risk in 26 million eBay negotiations.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Making good decisions requires people to appropriately explore their available options and generalize what they have learned. While computational models can explain exploratory behavior in constrained laboratory tasks, it is unclear to what extent these models generalize to real-world choice problems. We investigate the factors guiding exploratory behavior in a dataset consisting of 195,333 customers placing 1,613,967 orders from a large online food delivery service. We find important hallmarks of adaptive exploration and generalization, which we analyze using computational models. In particular, customers seem to engage in uncertainty-directed exploration and use feature-based generalization to guide their exploration. Our results provide evidence that people use sophisticated strategies to explore complex, real-world environments.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.