They found that aiming too high resulted in worse outcomes than being more cautious, but a little caution went a long way. Accepting results that were less than average meant missing out.
“There’s so many cultural messages that say that you can always just do better, you can always just try harder,” says Ekaterina Landgren, a post-doctoral fellow at Stanford and an author of the new paper. But this model suggests that’s not always the case. “When the rewards are more abundant, you should aim higher,” she says. “When the rewards are less abundant, that’s when you’re maybe more at the risk of overshooting.”
Is comparing yourself to other people a good or bad thing?
Of course, few of us look out at the world with a clear understanding of how abundant rewards are.
“They explore scenarios where the agents know the true distribution of rewards, and scenarios where they estimate it from watching their peers and the rewards they get,” says James O’Dwyer, a theoretical ecologist at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champagne who was not involved in the study. In studies modeling optimal foraging behavior, ecologists usually assume that organisms do have a sense of what’s out there, he says.