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Behavioral economics is a subfield of behavioral psychology that integrates microeconomic principles with the experimental analysis of behavior. Decades of behavioral economic work have identified two concepts robustly related to issues of risky health decisions and behavioral addictions: discounting and operant demand. Discounting is the phenomenon wherein uncertain or delayed outcomes lose value, often resulting in myopic decisions (e.g., choosing short-term benefits of heroin use over long-term healthy behaviors). Operant demand describes organisms’ persistent efforts to maintain access to reward. Collectively, discounting and demand comprise the reinforcement pathology model of unhealthy behavior, wherein counterproductive discounting and excessive demand coalesce to render risky and unhealthy reward preferences. This reinforcement pathology model may help explain behavioral addictions, issues of dependence, and other behavioral issues. This chapter describes the history of discounting and demand, common behavioral economic tasks to derive indices of discounting and demand, the hypothetical purchasing task, and the range of applications to addictions, novel addictions, and nonaddictive behaviors in the literature, to date.
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