Cost–benefit integration between the desirability of the expected reward and the imposed delay to delivery is supported by STN signals that dynamically combined both reward-related attributes to form a single integrated value estimate along an antero-posterior axis in this nucleus.

Whereas partner-serving phenotype is intuitively quantified as benefit release rate, molecular genetics revealed an example where this thinking fails, motivating a more general metric.

Behavioural evidence and computational analyses suggest that people tend to decline the pursuit of more rewarded goals because they, wrongly, expect them to require more effortful actions.

Gene duplication is a useful strategy to reduce intrinsic noise in gene expression, which can provide a selective advantage in scenarios of cost-benefit analysis of expression.

Empathy can evolve and foster cooperation in a game-theoretic analysis of behavior.

Intra-individual variability in choice, response time, subjective effort, confidence, and choice-induced preference change and certainty gain is explained by a cost–benefit model of cognitive resource allocation.

Unlike humans and starlings which use memories of both absolute and relative information to decide between options in novel contexts, bumblebees rely only on the remembered ordinal ranking of options.

Amphetamine reduces reward signaling by neurons in rat prefrontal cortex, but increases the stability of population dynamics, which account for animals’ increased task engagement, despite reduced reward motivation.

Experiments in macaques and humans reveal time-varying changes in prefrontal cortex activity that occur during decisions based on costs and benefits.

A selective reuptake inhibitor shows a beneficial effect in healthy humans during an effort-benefit tradeoff task, mediated at the computational level by a specific alleviation of effort cost.