Fear and Promise of the Unknown: How Losses Discourage and Promote Exploration

Many situations involving exploration, such as businesses expanding into new products or locations, expose the explorer to the potential for subjective losses. How does the potential to experience losses during the course of a search affect individuals’ appetite for exploration? In three incentivized studies, we manipulate search outcomes by presenting participants either with a gain-only environment or a gain-loss environment. The two environments offer objectively identical incentives for exploration: using a framing manipulation, we decrease gain-loss payoffs and provide participants an initial endowment to offset the difference. Participants decide how to explore a one-dimensional space, receiving payoffs based on their location each period. We predict and find that participants are motivated to avoid losses, which increases exploration when they are incurring losses, but decreases exploration when they face the potential for losses. We conclude that exploration is driven by hope of potential gains, constrained by fear of potential losses, and motivated by avoidance of experienced losses.