{"pk":49678,"title":"State Sensitivity in an Additive Discovery Game","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Successful innovation hinges on balancing exploring new ideas and exploiting existing ones. A rational innovator should be state-sensitive, effectively switching to exploitation when the best available idea reaches some standard. We tackle innovation with a discovery-by-recombination game under additive reward growth, and compare the optimal state-dependent policy with a state-independent policy. Our experiment reveals that participants made state-dependent decisions, exploring more in rounds with early successes, albeit being told of the same true success probability. In contrast, the optimal state-dependent policy switches to exploitation earlier. This suggests that participants' state-sensitivity may be driven by ad-hoc subjective probabilities. Participants also deviated from optimality through excessive exploration, switching multiple times between exploration and exploitation, and their switching points also differed from the theoretical optimum.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Psychology; Decision making; Computational Modeling; Mathematical modeling"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/31c2r0js","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Yifan","middle_name":"","last_name":"Hong","name_suffix":"","institution":"Tsinghua University","department":""},{"first_name":"Chen","middle_name":"","last_name":"Wang","name_suffix":"","institution":"Tsinghua University","department":""},{"first_name":"Bonan","middle_name":"","last_name":"Zhao","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Edinburgh","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2025-01-01T13:00:00-05:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49678/galley/37640/download/"}]}