title: Anticipation and choice heuristics in the dynamic consumption of pain relief.
abstract: Humans frequently need to allocate resources across multiple time-steps. Economic theory proposes that subjects do so according to a stable set of intertemporal preferences, but the computational demands of such decisions encourage the use of formally less competent heuristics. Few empirical studies have examined dynamic resource allocation decisions systematically. Here we conducted an experiment involving the dynamic consumption over approximately 15 minutes of a limited budget of relief from moderately painful stimuli. We had previously elicited the participants' time preferences for the same painful stimuli in one-off choices, allowing us to assess self-consistency. Participants exhibited three characteristic behaviors: saving relief until the end, spreading relief across time, and early spending, of which the last was markedly less prominent. The likelihood that behavior was heuristic rather than normative is suggested by the weak correspondence between one-off and dynamic choices. We show that the consumption choices are consistent with a combination of simple heuristics involving early-spending, spreading or saving of relief until the end, with subjects predominantly exhibiting the last two.
authors: Centre for Health Policy, Institute of Global Health Innovation, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom; Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
authors: Giles W
authors: GW
authors: Story
authors: Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, Coventry, United Kingdom.
authors: Ivo
authors: I
authors: Vlaev
authors: Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
authors: Peter
authors: P
authors: Dayan
authors: Center for Information and Neural Networks, National Institute for Information and Communications Technology, Osaka, Japan; Computational and Biological Learning Laboratory, Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
authors: Ben
authors: B
authors: Seymour
authors: Centre for Health Policy, Institute of Global Health Innovation, Imperial College London, London, United Kingdom.
authors: Ara
authors: A
authors: Darzi
authors: Wellcome Trust Centre for Neuroimaging, University College London, London, United Kingdom.
authors: Raymond J
authors: RJ
authors: Dolan
mesh_terms: D059031:Anticipation, Psychological / Q000502:physiology; D002755:Choice Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D019295:Computational Biology; D005260:Female; D000066506:Heuristics / Q000502:physiology*; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008959:Models, Neurological; D010146:Pain / Q000523:psychology*; D059408:Pain Management / Q000523:psychology*