Stephen C. Stearns - Economic Decisions for the Foraging Individual

Here's another useful video lecture. It's from the Open Yale Course 'EB122: Principles of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior', taught by Stephen C. Stearns, Edward P. Bass Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology.

Here is his overview of the lecture:

There are several ways to examine the behaviors of organisms when they forage or hunt for food or mates. These behaviors become more complex in higher organisms, such as primates and whales, which can hunt in groups. Foragers and hunters have been shown to examine the marginal cost and marginal benefit of continuing an action and then adjust their behaviors accordingly. They are also able to handle risk by hoarding resources.

Here is the course home page on Yale Open Courses.

This material is of interest because of the importance of economic analyses of decisions by living animals, and foraging is an area where there's been considerable progress. Behavioural ecology is one of the areas in science where you'll regularly run into talk of common currencies. Behavioural ecologists are sometimes relatively agnostic about the mechanisms producing behaviour, but sometimes intensely interested in them. (The same course includes a useful session - number 10 - on genomic conflict.)

Paul Glimcher - Video Lecture

Postings here have been a bit thin and slow lately. I've been teaching a lot. Work continues when it can, though. I'm working on adding something about neuroeconomics. In the interim, here's a very fine talk by Paul Glimcher of NYU, on the subject of "Neurobiological Foundations of Economic Choice". Glimcher has extraordinarily deep understanding of a variety of economic theories, and of brain science. This is a fairly accessible, and very clear and lucid, exposition of the outlines of his research programme. It's really well worth watching, and a useful introduction/companion to Glimcher's terrific 2011 book Foundations of Neuroeconomic Analysis.

Elsewhere on this blog you can find one discussion of a paper by Glimcher (and Levy) reviewing and extending some of the neural evidence for a common currency: The Root of All Value.