from Part I - Concepts of Addiction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 July 2020
Addictive disorders effect millions of people and have an economic impact that continues to grow each year. Although research is making headway in dealing with addictive substances and behavioral disorders, finding underlying mechanisms that span across disorders is less common. Behavioral economics is one continually developing and refining tool researchers have been using as a means to understand addictions. The first, and most researched area of behavioral economics is delay discounting (DD), which is the subjective devaluation of a reward as a function of the time to receiving it. Researchers use DD to evaluate choice and how that underlies addictive disorders and decision making; yet, they still debate whether discounting rates are stable or change over time. Probability discounting (PD) is another piece of the behavioral economics puzzle. Commonly used in gambling disorder research, PD evaluates behavioral decision making involving the chance of receiving the reinforcer, as opposed to the time delay to receiving it. The final major piece of behavioral economics is demand. This area looks at the amount of effort or resources an organism is willing to expend to access a reinforcer. In this chapter each of these areas will be further explored and understood through the lens of behavioral economics as a whole.
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