Thursday, June 28, 2012

Understanding money? Even Monkeys do (os)

Lately, two researches have tested, whether they can teach monkeys the use of money. Hence, they introduced into a little monkey-cage-world some sort of money, or better, medium of exchange. In what followed, they thought the monkeys to buy food by the use of this legal-monkey-tender. Additionally, they conducted several experiments such as price shocks (doubling of food prices) or gambles in order to reveal the monkeys preferences.
It turned out that those monkeys behave in a comparable way to human being, such as utility maximization or decision making. However, also another, apparently very human characteristic unfolded concerning the use of money ... please see here at Freakonomics