(Non-) impact of task experience on behavioral economic decision-making.

Abstract

Behavioral economic research has been widely conducted via crowdsourcing resources to evaluate novel task designs or pilot interventions. One under recognized and yet-to-be tested concern is the impact of non-naïvety (i.e., prior task exposure) on behavioral economic task performance. We evaluated the influence of non-naïvety on task performance in two popular areas of behavioral economic research: behavioral economic demand and delay discounting. Participants (N = 485) recruited using Amazon Mechanical Turk (mTurk) completed alcohol and soda purchase tasks and delay discounting tasks for monetary and alcohol outcomes. Equivalence of responding and effect sizes with clinical variables were compared based on prior task experience. Over one quarter of participants reported demand task experience (26.9%) and nearly half endorsed delay discounting task experience (48.6%). Statistically equivalent responding was observed for alcohol purchase task data with less-than-small effect size differences based on task experience (d = 0.01-0.13). Similar results were observed for a soda purchase task thereby supporting generalization to a non-alcohol commodity. Measures of convergent and discriminant validity for behavioral economic demand indicated medium-to-large and stimulus-specific effect sizes with little variation based on prior task exposure. Delay discounting for money and alcohol showed some sensitivity to prior task experience (i.e., less steep discounting for non-naïve participants), however these effects were attenuated after accounting for group differences in alcohol use. These findings support the fidelity of behavioral economic task outcomes and emphasize that participant nonnaïvety in crowdsourcing settings may minimally impact performance on behavioral economic assays commonly used in behavioral and addiction science. Public Significance StatementParticipants with prior exposure to experimental procedures may systematically differ from those who are new to completing these tasks. We find that individuals with and without prior experience completing common behavioral economic procedures are similar in their responding on demand and delay discounting tasks. Furthermore, responses correspond closely with and were selectively related to clinical substance use measures. These findings suggest that prior experience with wellvalidated behavioral economic procedures in crowdsourced platforms does not produce systematic changes in response profiles and construct validity.