Exploration-exploitation trade-off in a treasure hunting game

Searching experiments conducted in different virtual environments over a gender balanced group of people revealed a gender irrelevant scale-free spread of searching activity on large spatiotemporal scales. We have suggested and solved analytically a simple statistical model of the coherent-noise type describing the exploration-exploitation trade-off in humans ("should I stay or should I go"). The model exhibits a variety of saltatory behaviours, ranging from Levy flights occurring under uncertainty to Brownian walks performed by a treasure hunter confident of the eventual success. © 2013 Elsevier B.V.