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Record W4416566621 · doi:10.1017/eec.2025.10027

Strategies in the multi-armed bandit

2025· article· en· W4416566621 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.
no affNo Canadian affiliation: this work is invisible to an affiliation-only frame.
No Canadian affiliation. An affiliation-only frame, the usual design, would never have seen this work. It is one of the works that make the case for inverting the frame.

Bibliographic record

VenueExperimental Economics · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldDecision Sciences
TopicAdvanced Bandit Algorithms Research
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersBaylor UniversityUniversity of TorontoPurdue University
KeywordsReinforcement learningProbabilistic logicSelection (genetic algorithm)Multi-armed banditSet (abstract data type)

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Abstract This paper analyzes individual behavior in multi-armed bandit problems. We use a between-subjects experiment to implement four bandit problems that vary based on the horizon (indefinite or finite) and the number of bandit arms (two or three). We analyze commonly suggested strategies and find that an overwhelming majority of subjects are best fit by either a probabilistic “win-stay lose-shift” strategy or reinforcement learning. However, we show that subjects violate the assumptions of the probabilistic win-stay lose-shift strategy as switching depends on more than the previous outcome. We design two new “biased” strategies that adapt either reinforcement learning or myopic quantal response by incorporating a bias toward choosing the previous arm. We find that a majority of subjects are best fit by one of these two strategies but also find heterogeneity in subjects’ best-fitting strategies. We show that the performance of our biased strategies is robust to adapting popular strategies from other literatures (e.g., EWA and I-SAW) and using different selection criteria. Additionally, we find that our biased strategies best fit a majority of subjects when analyzing a new treatment with a new set of subjects.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.355
Threshold uncertainty score0.459

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.136
GPT teacher head0.486
Teacher spread0.349 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it