Competitive foraging, decision making, and the ecological rationality of the matching law

The matching law describes how individual foragers often allocate their choices, occasionally suboptimally, in experimental situations. The `ideal free distribution' predicts how groups of foraging agents should distribute themselves, optimally, over patchy environments. This paper explores the possibility that a single behavioural heuristic can account for both phenomena, allowing the potential suboptimality of matching to be understood in terms of adaptation to a group context. Two simple heuristics are compared, epsilon-sampling and omega-sampling: the latter is successful in both cases, but contrary to claims in the literature the former is successful in neither. These results emphasise the importance of multiple environmental value estimates in effective decision making.