Experience shapes future foraging decisions in a brainless organism

Experience shapes future foraging decisions in a brainless organism
Jules Smith-Ferguson, Terence C Burnham, Madeleine Beekman

Adaptive Behavior

The ability to change one’s behaviour based on past experience has obvious fitness benefits. Drawing from past experience requires some kind of information storage and retrieval. The acellular slime mould Physarum polycephalum has previously been shown to use stored information about negative stimuli. Here, we repeatedly exposed the slime mould to three stimuli with differing levels of potential risk: light, salt and lavender. We asked if the slime mould would change its foraging behaviour depending on the level of risk. In our experiment, taking risk yielded better food. We consistently selected individuals that made the same foraging decision (accepting risk or avoiding risk) over multiple trials. Hence, the same individuals were tested over a period of time, but only individuals that continued to make the same decision were allowed to continue. Regardless of selection regime, slime moulds in the light became more likely to select the food in the light over time, while those exposed to salt became more salt averse. Lavender had no effect. Our results can cautiously be interpreted as examples of non-associative learning, adding to a growing body of work showing that the absence of a central nervous system is no impediment to possessing sophisticated information processing.

Read the full article at: journals.sagepub.com

Incentives, competition, and inequality in markets for creative production

Stefano Balietti, Christoph Riedl

Research Policy
Volume 50, Issue 4, May 2021, 104212

Incentive structures and the intensity of competition play a key role in shaping the quality and direction of creative work. Organizing incentives as stratified rewards has emerged as a universal feature of modern society. However, this has implications for the producers and consumers of creative work that are not fully understood. We test the effects of reward stratification on producers, reviewers, and consumers of creative work by using data from a large online experiment of an artificial market for creative products. We find that competition induced by stratified rewards shapes the evolution of creative production. The quality of each tier in a stratified market is consistent with its position in the hierarchy. The top tier maintains high quality standards by attracting many submissions and then filtering its output, operating as an effective sorting device for budget-constrained consumers. However, reward stratification leads to higher levels of inequality and market exit among producers who fall behind in earnings, despite producing high-quality work. We discuss the broad implications of reward stratification across individual and market aggregate levels. This discussion contributes to the cumulative advantage debate in creative industries specifically, and to the creative aspects of scientific fields and industrial markets more broadly.

Sludge: What Stops Us from Getting Things Done and What to Do about It, by Sunstein, Cass R.

How we became so burdened by red tape and unnecessary paperwork, and why we must do better.

We’ve all had to fight our way through administrative sludge–filling out complicated online forms, mailing in paperwork, standing in line at the motor vehicle registry. This kind of red tape is a nuisance, but, as Cass Sunstein shows in Sludge, it can also also impair health, reduce growth, entrench poverty, and exacerbate inequality. Confronted by sludge, people just give up–and lose a promised outcome: a visa, a job, a permit, an educational opportunity, necessary medical help. In this lively and entertaining look at the terribleness of sludge, Sunstein explains what we can do to reduce it.
Because of sludge, Sunstein, explains, too many people don’t receive benefits to which they are entitled. Sludge even prevents many people from exercising their constitutional rights–when, for example, barriers to voting in an election are too high. (A Sludge Reduction Act would be a Voting Rights Act.) Sunstein takes readers on a tour of the not-so-wonderful world of sludge, describes justifications for certain kinds of sludge, and proposes “Sludge Audits” as a way to measure effects of sludge. On balance, Sunstein argues, sludge infringes on human dignity, making people feel that their time and even their lives don’t matter. We must do better.

Preorder at: www.amazon.com

Decentralization and regional convergence: Evidence from night‐time lights data

Decentralization and regional convergence: Evidence from night‐time lights data
Bibek Adhikari Saroj Dhital

The proponents of decentralization argue that it improves economic growth, while critics say it increases regional inequality. The empirical evidence is mixed and based mostly on developed countries due to a lack of income data for lower administrative regions. We combine night‐lights data captured by satellites with a new database on decentralization derived from actual laws that are institutionalized and circumscribed from a global sample of countries. We then analyze the impact of decentralization on regional convergence using income data from the first and second administrative regions. We find that decentralization hinders within‐country regional convergence, especially in the developing countries.

Read the full article at: onlinelibrary.wiley.com