ArticlePsychology of addictive behaviors : journal of the Society of Psychologists in Addictive Behaviors2023
Notes on demand: Conceptual and empirical benefits of applying Rachlin's discounting equation to demand data.
Article in Psychology of addictive behaviors : journal of the Society of Psychologists in Addictive Behaviors, 2023. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers.
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3 citing papers in PubMed.
- The Effects of Token Economy Menu Manipulations on Token Demand.The Psychological record · 2025Article
- Overviewing the exponential model of demand and introducing a simplification that solves issues of span, scale, and zeros.Experimental and clinical psychopharmacology · 2025Review
- Hyperbolic discounting and exponentiated demand: Modeling demand for cigarettes in three dimensions.Journal of the experimental analysis of behavior · 2023Article
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Abstract
objectiveHoward Rachlin wrote extensively on how value diminishes in a hyperbolic form, and he contributed to understanding choice processes between different commodities as a molar pattern of behavior. The field of behavioral economic demand has been dominated by exponential decay functions, indicating that decreases in consumption of a commodity are best fit by exponential functions. Because of the success of Rachlin's equation at describing how hyperbolic decay affects the value of a commodity across various factors (e.g., delay, probability, social distance), we attempted to extend his equation to behavioral economic demand data for alcohol and opioids.
methodRachlin's discounting equation was applied to estimate consumption on alcohol purchase task data and nonhuman drug demand data. We compared results of his equation to the exponentiated demand equation using both a mixed-effects modeling approach and a two-stage approach.
resultsRachlin's equation provided better fits to consumption data than the exponentiated equation for both mixed-effects and two-stage modeling. We also found that traditional demand metrics, such as
conclusionsRachlin's equation better described demand data than did the exponentiated equation, indicating that demand for a commodity may decrease hyperbolically rather than exponentially. Other benefits of his equation are that it does not have the same pitfalls as the current exponential equations and is relatively straightforward in its conceptualization when applied to demand data. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).
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