Thresholds of Behavioral Flexibility in Turbulent Environments for Individual and Group Success
search outward and decide whether to stay in the realm of Control and Prevention or to switch to , say , Environmental . Again , I would evaluate how my strategy worked and again be faced with the question of whether to stay or switch .
This dilemma then applies yet another level up , should I be focusing on extrinsic or intrinsic factors ? I could go further : Should I even be focusing directly on malaria at all ? Maybe if what I am after is saving human lives , I should be focusing on education or anti-corruption . On the other hand , is it maybe all pointless and I should just go buy a boat ?
To make matters even more complex , the landscape in which we are injecting these policies is also typically turbulent : a strategy that worked great in the last period may not be effective in the next . In this case , should we ride out the turbulence and stick with the tried-and-true strategy or adapt to changing circumstances ?
Of course , policymakers have many resources at their disposal to answer many of these questions — they know whether drugs are having an effect compared to nets , and whether it paid more to focus on the environment than on social behavior . We have , in many cases , a great deal of data to shed real empirical light on the value of these policies . However , what we never know is the counterfactual — what if we had switched ? Moreover , we do not know how much better we could be doing . And most importantly , we don ’ t know if , when the environment changes , we should change with it , how poorly things should be going before we do , and how ready we should be to change things once we hit that threshold .
Overall , this paper is about the question of when you should stay or when you should do something else . In the words of Winston Churchill , when should you “ never , never , never ... give in ” and when should you , also in the words of Winston Churchill , when things have failed “ take up the next available option ?”
More specifically , the paper attempts to address the question of whether there are principles by which we , in any environment , could identify conditions under which we should stay or go , taking into account exogenous and endogenous environmental turbulence , as well as group level outcomes . To do this , I share a simple spatial agent-based model to explore a handful of parameters surrounding the question of whether to stay or switch when a strategy stops working .
Most specifically , the model allows for the running of histories where adaptive agents can choose to maximize utility using a given strategy , or switching to another type of agent that is rewarded for different behavior altogether . The core parameters in the model map to those surrounding any such decision in our personal lives and in policy : the turbulence of the environment , the behaviors of other actors in the system , and our own tolerance for what counts as failure : how bad should things be before we change ?
This structure allows us to ask and answer questions about the relationship between environment and flexibility in terms of individual utility : For example , how turbulent should the environment be before I change strategies ? What is the
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