The Origin of Behavior
By Thomas Brennan, Andrew W. Lo. 2011
83 citations recorded by the source corpus.
We propose a single evolutionary explanation for the origin of several behaviors that have been observed in organisms ranging from ants to human subjects, including risk-sensitive foraging, risk aversion, loss aversion, probability matching, randomization, and diversification. Given an initial population of individuals, each assigned a purely arbitrary behavior with respect to a binary choice problem, and assuming that offspring behave identically to their parents, only those behaviors linked to reproductive success will survive, and less reproductively successful behaviors will disappear at exponential rates. When the uncertainty in reproductive success is systematic, natural selection yields behaviors that may be individually sub-optimal but are optimal from the population perspective; when reproductive uncertainty is idiosyncratic, the individual and population perspectives coincide. This framework generates a surprisingly rich set of behaviors, and the simplicity and generality of our model suggest that these derived behaviors are primitive and nearly universal within and across species.
Subfields: Developmental and Educational Psychology, Sociology and Political Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/94d58cfbe06c16479ebc61854f296dcea9a86baf
Citations in the corpus
- Adaptive Markets and the New World Order (corrected May 2012) (2011, unknown): “See Lo (2011) for a more detailed discussion of the neuroscientific perspective on financial crises and Brennan and Lo (2011) for an evolutionary framework in which various behavioral regularities, such as risk aversion, loss aversion, and probability matching, emerge quite naturally through the for”
- The Genetics of Investment Biases (2014, background): “…biases we study in this paper could be the outcome of natural selection (e.g., Rayo and Becker, 2007; McDermott, Fowler, and Smirnov, 2008; Brennan and Lo, 2011; Johnson and Fowler, 2011).3 These studies argue that behaviors that represent investment biases in today's environment, such as…”
- Value versus growth investing: Why do different investors have different styles? (2015, unknown): “(8)Some of the theoretical work by Rayo and Becker (2007) and Brennan and Lo (2011) addresses why behaviors, even if not rational as defined in standard economic models, may survive human evolution. For further details and references, see, e.g., Cosmides and Tooby (1994), Chen et al. (2006), and San”