Niyogi, RK; (2015) What to do, when to do it, how long to do it for: a normative microscopic approach to the labour leisure tradeoff. Doctoral thesis , UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Dividing limited time between work and leisure is a common, everyday choice. Given the option, humans and other animals elect to distribute their time be- tween work and leisure, rather than choosing all of one and none of the other. Traditional accounts of the allocation of time have characterised behaviour on a macroscopic timescale, reporting and studying average times spent in work or leisure. We develop a novel, normative, microscopic framework in which subjects approximately maximise their expected returns by making momentary commit- ments to one or other activity. This generic theoretical framework is applied to the work-leisure tradeo . We determine the microscopic utility of leisure { an animal's innate preference irrespective of all other rewards and costs. We re- port our analyses of data from our collaboration with experimentalists who use brain stimulation reward (electrically stimulating reward circuits in the brain) { a powerful reward that does not satiate unlike food, and is not secondary, unlike money, on rat subjects. We show that in all subjects, this utility of leisure is non- linear. Subjects either prefer long leisure bouts all at one go, or many short ones, but are not indi erent to the division of leisure durations. We also develop new normative, microscopic models of how fatigue and satiation may impact decision- making, and make predictions about their e ect on the temporal distribution of choices. We then derive macroscopic utilities from microscopic ones and show how macro- scopic facets such as imperfect substitutability can arise. We show that by inte- grating our microscopic choices we can build macroscopic characterisations that are not only equivalent to, but richer than those a orded by previous macro- scopic characterisations. We therefore build a superset of traditional macroscopic quanti cations. Our normative, microscopic approach sheds new light on the na- ture of temporally relevant behaviour and may provide a powerful framework for understanding the psychological processes and neural computations underlying real-time cost-bene t decision-making.

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