The breadth-depth dilemma in a finite capacity model of decision-making
Moreno-Bote, R.; Drugowitsch, J.; Hayden, B.; Ramirez-Ruiz, J.
Show abstract
Decision-makers are often faced with limited information about the outcomes of their choices. Current formalizations of uncertain choice, such as the explore-exploit dilemma, do not apply well to decisions in which search capacity can be allocated to each option in variable amounts. Such choices confront decision-makers with the need to tradeoff between breadth - allocating a small amount of capacity to each of many options - and depth - focusing capacity on a few options. We formalize the breadth-depth dilemma through a finite sample capacity model. We find that, if capacity is smaller than 4-7 samples, it is optimal to draw one sample per alternative, favoring breadth. However, for larger capacities, a sharp transition is observed, and it becomes best to deeply sample a very small fraction of alternatives, that decreases with the square root of capacity. Thus, ignoring most options, even when capacity is large enough to shallowly sample all of them, reflects a signature of optimal behavior. Our results also provide a rich casuistic for metareasoning in multi-alternative decisions with bounded capacity.
Matching journals
The top 3 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.