The Origin of Behavior

58 Pages Posted: 15 Nov 2009 Last revised: 23 Nov 2010

See all articles by Thomas J. Brennan

Thomas J. Brennan

Harvard Law School

Andrew W. Lo

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Laboratory for Financial Engineering

Date Written: November 15, 2009

Abstract

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.

Keywords: Behavioral Finance, Probability Matching, Loss Aversion, Risk Aversion, Risk Preferences, Evolution

JEL Classification: G00, D81, D01, D03, C73

Suggested Citation

Brennan, Thomas J. and Lo, Andrew W., The Origin of Behavior (November 15, 2009). Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1506264 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1506264

Thomas J. Brennan

Harvard Law School ( email )

1557 Massachusetts Ave
6 Ever
Cambridge, MA 02138
United States
617-495-3141 (Phone)

Andrew W. Lo (Contact Author)

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) - Laboratory for Financial Engineering ( email )

100 Main Street
E62-618
Cambridge, MA 02142
United States
617-253-0920 (Phone)
781 891-9783 (Fax)

HOME PAGE: http://web.mit.edu/alo/www

Do you have negative results from your research you’d like to share?

Paper statistics

Downloads
1,800
Abstract Views
11,125
Rank
17,515
PlumX Metrics