Commodity discounting: Obstacles and solutions.

Addictive behaviors involve patterns of impulsive choices. Discount functions are a useful means of describing the behavioral contingencies involved in those impulsive choices. Although monetary discounting tasks have proven useful, most impulsive behaviors of interest involve nonmonetary consequences. OBJECTIVE: Developing effective commodity discounting tasks is critical for assessing how delay (and other variables) influences choice with respect to meaningful real-world commodities (e.g., high-calorie foods, alcohol, opioids, and other drugs). METHOD: Identifying the obstacles specific to nonmonetary commodity discounting and evaluating solutions to those obstacles. RESULTS: Those obstacles include (1) real versus hypothetical commodities, (2) framing, (3) commodity indivisibility, (4) diminishing marginal utility, and (5) variations in economic context. CONCLUSIONS: Solutions are presented and evaluated for each of these five obstacles, including the following: (1) assessing relevant experiences and explicitly stipulating transportation and storage issues, (2) systematic analyses across various wordings and holding wording constant across commodities, (3) using an adjusting delay procedure with only whole commodities, (4) assessing value for different commodity amounts (without delay) and adopting quantitative models of discounting that include marginal utility, and (5) controlling for motivating operations, accounting for individual histories, and using closed economies. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The Effects of Obligatory and Preferential Frames on Delay Discounting.

Human decision making is partly determined by the verbal stimuli involved in a choice. Verbal stimuli that may be particularly relevant to human decision making are the words should and like, whereby should is presumably associated with what one ought to choose, and like is presumably associated with what one prefers to choose. The current study examined the potential effects of should and like on decisions in a monetary delay-discounting task. Eighty-three participants were recruited from Amazon's Mechanical Turk and were randomly assigned to a sequence of 2 conditions-should and like-in a repeated-measures experimental design. Based on condition assignment, the questions "Which should you choose?" and "Which would you like to choose?" appeared above each monetary option and its respective delay. Overall, participants demonstrated significantly lower levels of discounting in the should condition when compared to the like condition. However, this effect was much less consistent for participants exposed to the should condition prior to the like condition. The results of the current investigation indicate that the use of the words should and like constitutes separate classes of verbal stimuli that we refer to as obligatory and preferential frames. The effect of obligatory and preferential frames on delay discounting may be relevant to the prediction and control of decision making in social contexts.