Search on Rugged Landscapes: An Experimental Study
通过实验室实验研究人类在复杂组合任务中的决策，发现成功会缩小搜索范围，失败则促进探索，且任务复杂性通过反馈条件间接影响行为。
This paper presents findings from a laboratory experiment on human decision making in a complex combinatorial task. We draw on the canonical NK model to depict tasks with varying complexity and find strong evidence for a behavioral model of adaptive search. Success narrows down search to the neighborhood of the status quo, whereas failure promotes gradually more exploratory search. Task complexity does not have a direct effect on behavior but systematically affects the feedback conditions that guide success-induced exploitation and failure-induced exploration. The analysis also shows that human participants were prone to overexploration, since they broke off the search for local improvements too early. We derive stylized decision rules that generate the search behavior observed in the experiment and discuss the implications of our findings for individual decision making and organizational search.