Resource Allocation in the Brain
基于神经科学证据，将大脑建模为一个组织，协调员在资源有限的情况下向不同脑系统分配资源，系统私有信息竞争资源，最优机制是对每个系统设置与另一系统需求负相关的资源上限。
When an individual performs several tasks simultaneously, processing resources must be allocated to different brain systems to produce energy for neurons to fire. Following the evidence from neuroscience, we model the brain as an organization in which a coordinator allocates limited resources to the brain systems responsible for the different tasks. Systems are privately informed about the amount of resources necessary to perform their task and compete to obtain the resources. The coordinator arbitrates the demands while satisfying the resource constraint. We show that the optimal mechanism is to impose to each system with privately known needs a cap in resources that depends negatively on the amount of resources requested by the other system. This allocation can be implemented using a biologically plausible mechanism. Finally, we provide some implications of our theory: (i) performance can be flawless for sufficiently simple tasks, (ii) the dynamic allocation rule exhibits inertia (current allocations are increasing in past needs), and (iii) different cognitive tasks are performed by different systems only if the tasks are sufficiently important.