Exploration-exploitation Trade-off in a Treasure Hunting Game

Searching experiments conducted in different virtual environments over a gender balanced group of people revealed a gender irrelevant scale-free spread of searching activity on large spatiotemporal scales. We have suggested and solved analytically a simple statistical model of the coherent-noise type describing the exploration-exploitation trade-off in humans (''should I stay or should I go''). The model exhibits a variety of saltatory behaviours, ranging from Levy flights occurring under uncertainty to Brownian walks performed by a treasure hunter confident of the eventual success.

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