Extra-experimental scarcity impacts hypothetical operant demand: A natural SARS-CoV-2 eperiment.

Behavioral economic demand models quantify the extent to which an organism defends its consumption of a commodity. Commodity purchase tasks permit humans a quick yet psychometrically sound approach to assessing commodity demand for various retail products. Operant behavioral economic literature suggests economy type (open vs closed) can significantly alter demand, yet this effect is largely undocumented in the commodity purchase task literature. In this study, we leveraged the market pressures for retail goods (hand lotion and sanitizer; paper towels and toilet paper; soda and water) resulting from SARS-CoV-2 into a natural experiment comparing within-subject demand across two time-points during the pandemic using a crowdsourced approach. Results suggest that hypothetical commodity purchase tasks are sensitive to extra-experimental market pressures (e.g., scarcity due to the closing of economies), adding additional confidence to the self-report nature of purchase task responding and providing further construct validity to these approaches.

Applied behavioral economics and public health policies: Historical precedence and translational promise.

Behavioral economics is an approach to understanding behavior though integrating behavioral psychology and microeconomic principles. Advances in behavioral economics have resulted in quick-to-administer tasks to assess discounting (i.e., decrements in the subjective value of a commodity due to delayed or probabilistic receipt) and demand (i.e., effort exerted to defend baseline consumption of a commodity amidst increasing constraints)-these tasks are built upon decades of foundational work from the experimental analysis of behavior and exhibit adequate psychometric properties. We propose that the behavioral economic approach is particularly well suited, then, for experimentally evaluating potential public policy decisions, particularly during urgent times or crises. Using examples from our collaborations (e.g., cannabis legalization, happy hour alcohol pricing, severe weather alerts, COVID-19 vaccine marketing), we demonstrate how behavioral economic approaches have rendered novel insights to guide policy development and garnered widespread attention outside of academia. We conclude with implications on multidisciplinary work and other areas in need of behavioral economic investigations.