How cute is that? Little monkey economists judging each others' value by how much they gain from them. That's almost as cute as a chimpanzee riding on a segway.
A monkey that has acquired the sole power to hand out apples is generously rewarded with grooming sessions by the other monkeys in its group. But as soon as another monkey can hand out apples as well, the market value of the first monkey is halved.
Researchers put out fruit in the monkeys' environment, but only let one, socially low-level monkey, access the fruit and make it available to others. Subsequently, the amount of time the others spent grooming the privileged monkey increased while the time the privileged monkey was required to spend grooming other monkeys decreased.
However, when the researchers allowed another monkey to access the fruit, the extra perks that the first monkey gained were halved. So, because the supply of monkeys with special fruit access privileges doubled, the amount that the other monkeys were willing to "pay" in grooming sessions halved. That's pretty interesting. I wonder how they decide to do things like that. Animals are weird.
CHIMPAZEEE RIDING ON A SEGWAY! Its interesting to see how animals make these kinds of trades. I wonder if this monkey has a comparative advantage to getting these apples.
ReplyDeletei think this says something about economic theory. the tendencies of supply and demand, without the same variables as that microcosm would have with human beings. (A)
ReplyDeleteIt's amazing how another species are able to take part of such a complicated thing as Supply and Demand. Is it possible they learned the notion from the humans or perhaps they were doing this practice even before humans? T
ReplyDeleteI think this article is kind of interesting which related the animals' economic society to the human society, I've heared about a monkey that has acquired the sole power to hand out apples is generously rewarded with grooming sessions by the other monkeys in its group in national geographic magazine before, this story kind of made me thinking about people might can go though the animal's economic word to see if we can find out some useful things for us? A,E
ReplyDeleteThis is quite an interesting article...Is it a kind of animal nature? Human beings just systematized and developed this theory. (guess?)
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