title: Intrinsic Valuation of Information in Decision Making under Uncertainty.
abstract: In a dynamic world, an accurate model of the environment is vital for survival, and agents ought regularly to seek out new information with which to update their world models. This aspect of behaviour is not captured well by classical theories of decision making, and the cognitive mechanisms of information seeking are poorly understood. In particular, it is not known whether information is valued only for its instrumental use, or whether humans also assign it a non-instrumental intrinsic value. To address this question, the present study assessed preference for non-instrumental information among 80 healthy participants in two experiments. Participants performed a novel information preference task in which they could choose to pay a monetary cost to receive advance information about the outcome of a monetary lottery. Importantly, acquiring information did not alter lottery outcome probabilities. We found that participants were willing to incur considerable monetary costs to acquire payoff-irrelevant information about the lottery outcome. This behaviour was well explained by a computational cognitive model in which information preference resulted from aversion to temporally prolonged uncertainty. These results strongly suggest that humans assign an intrinsic value to information in a manner inconsistent with normative accounts of decision making under uncertainty. This intrinsic value may be associated with adaptive behaviour in real-world environments by producing a bias towards exploratory and information-seeking behaviour.
authors.affiliation: Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, Australia.|Department of Finance, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, Australia.
authors.forename: Daniel
authors.identifier: 0000-0001-6608-9026
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Bennett
authors.affiliation: Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, Australia.
authors.forename: Stefan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Bode
authors.affiliation: Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, Australia.
authors.forename: Maja
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Brydevall
authors.affiliation: Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, Australia.|Department of Finance, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, Australia.
authors.forename: Hayley
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-9863-3644
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Warren
authors.affiliation: Department of Finance, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Victoria, Australia.
authors.forename: Carsten
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Murawski
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000465:Algorithms; D019295:Computational Biology; D003657:Decision Making / Q000502:physiology*; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D057226:Information Seeking Behavior / Q000502:physiology*; D008297:Male; D012309:Risk-Taking; D035501:Uncertainty; D055815:Young Adult