title: Some work and some play: microscopic and macroscopic approaches to labor and leisure.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Ritwik K
authors.initials: RK
authors.lastname: Niyogi
authors.affiliation: Center for Studies in Behavioral Neurobiology, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Shizgal
authors.affiliation: Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Peter
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Dayan
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D019295:Computational Biology; D003657:Decision Making; D006801:Humans; D007899:Leisure Activities; D008954:Models, Biological; D017711:Nonlinear Dynamics; D013269:Stochastic Processes; D014937:Work