The Origin of Behavior
Thomas J. Brennan
Northwestern University School of Law
Andrew W. Lo
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Sloan School of Management; Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER)
November 15, 2009
We propose a single evolutionary explanation for the origin of several behaviors that have been observed in organisms ranging from ants to human subjects, including risk-sensitive foraging, risk aversion, loss aversion, probability matching, randomization, and diversification. Given an initial population of individuals, each assigned a purely arbitrary behavior with respect to a binary choice problem, and assuming that offspring behave identically to their parents, only those behaviors linked to reproductive success will survive, and less reproductively successful behaviors will disappear at exponential rates. When the uncertainty of reproductive success is systematic, natural selection yields behaviors that may be individually sub-optimal but are optimal from the population perspective; when reproductive uncertainty is idiosyncratic, the individual and population perspectives coincide. This framework generates a surprisingly rich set of behaviors, and the simplicity and generality of our model suggest that these derived behaviors are primitive and nearly universal within and across species.
Number of Pages in PDF File: 58
Keywords: Behavioral Finance, Probability Matching, Loss Aversion, Risk Aversion, Risk Preferences, Evolution
JEL Classification: G00, D81, D01, D03, C73working papers series
Date posted: November 15, 2009 ; Last revised: November 23, 2010
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