Behavioral Economic Demand: How Simulated Behavioral Tasks Can Inform Health Policy

Abstract

Consumers decide what to purchase, under conditions of constraint (e.g., commodity price). According to behavioral economic demand, commodity purchase task (CPT) can measure hypothetical decisions about purchases under varied simulated policy conditions (e.g., introduction of new cigarette taxes, happy hour drinking specials). These tasks permit rapid data collection without sacrificing methodological rigor or the validity of conclusions reached. The CPT allows researchers to simulate new policies, to determine their relative risks and benefits, thus offering an opportunity to optimize prior to rollout. Behavioral outcomes related to consumer purchases also make the CPT data readily translatable to policymakers, including constituent health behavior. This article provides a background on CPTs, a review of literature related to policy-aimed CPTs, and a start on best practices for other behavioral scientists interested in applying CPT to inform public policy efforts. It also serves as a primer for policymakers seeking to evaluate usage of this tool.

Matching, behavioral economics, and teleological behaviorism: Final cause analysis of substance use and health behavior

“…Steven Hursh's early work (1980, 1984) was influential in establishing a strong connection between molar behaviorism and economics, and he later extended behavioral economics to drug self‐administration (Hursh, 1991) and articulated the implications for public policy related to health behavior (Hursh & Roma, 2013). Hursh and Roma's (2013) vision of the public policy implications of behavioral economics, such as community‐ or policy‐level variables, has been realized through the use of simulated purchase tasks (Reed, Gelino, & Strickland, 2022). These simulated tasks rely on hypothetical scenarios to present complex independent variables to model real world environments and contingencies (Roma et al, 2017), including simulating community and regulatory interventions.…”

“…In sum, behavior analysts often regard hypothetical tasks or one‐off assessments with skepticism in favor of direct observation of response rates over extended periods until steady‐state patterns emerge. Such initial skepticism was justified, but decades of purchase task refinement with hypothetical demand assessments amenable to quantitative analysis have evolved the operant analysis of demand from self‐administration approaches to our modern conceptually systematic, yet simulated, approach (Reed, Gelino, & Strickland, 2022). Major benefits of these tasks are the construction of face‐valid measures that simulate difficult‐to‐manipulate variables in the laboratory, such as community‐ and policy‐level variables, and rapid data collection to assist decision‐making in managing real‐world public health problems.…”

Using behavioral economics to optimize safer undergraduate late‐night transportation

“…Recently, behavioral‐economic researchers have increasingly deployed the commodity purchase task, an extension of this operant‐demand framework for use in difficult‐to‐study contexts (Jacobs & Bickel, 1999; Roma et al, 2016; Strickland et al, 2017; see also Hursh & Roma, 2013; Reed, Gelino, et al, 2022; Roma et al, 2017). The purchase task was first introduced to address the ethical concerns arising in pharmacological valuation measures, as in with illicit substances.…”