@ericneyman, I just read your blog post on exploitation bias. Some thoughts:

I think there are a lot of other plausible explanations.

1) Risk Aversion: a risk averse agent would be expected to have an exploitation-bias.

2) Habit formation: some people form habits more easily than others. Experiences which are consistently pleasurable or displeasurable (e.g. food or homework or sending packages to/from India) have a higher tendency to form such habits.

(2) could work against you (e.g. not sending things to your friend, Stiglitz) or for you (doing Econ stuff constantly and netting a Nobel.)

3) Social norms: I know social groups which are exploration-biased, usually a result of social pressure from the group. (For cuisine, one might think Darwin’s Glutton Club). Therefore, it also seems reasonable that our exploitation bias comes from the norms of society at large.

And indeed, I can think of a few more hypotheses, but if I listed them, this thread would be longer still. My hunch, however is that exploitation-bias is a combination of 1 and 3, as those are the best documented in psychological literature.

If you are interested in exposing the origin of exploitation-bias, I'd test those hypotheses.