Breaking the Tug-of-War: What Neuroeconomics Can Gain by Moving Past Competition-Only Models

Popular models of decision-making characterize choice dynamics as a tug-of-war process, where evidence for competing options accumulates until a threshold is reached. While these models capture several key aspects of decision-making, they have difficulty accounting for others, including the influence of individual option values on choice speed and the subjective cost of choosing, as well as the fact that choice competition is itself malleable. This chapter argues for a broader framework that moves beyond a strict tug-of-war approach, by incorporating both independent and competitive evidence accumulation. We show that adopting this alternate framework not only better accounts for the evaluative processes underlying decisions about which option is best but also generalizes more effectively to other types of decisions—including those involving different evaluation criteria (e.g., choosing the worst option), integrating over options (e.g., appraising the overall set), deciding whether and when to choose (e.g., deferral or opt-out), and determining how many options to choose.