Commodity discounting: Obstacles and solutions.

Abstract

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). Identifying the obstacles specific to nonmonetary commodity discounting and evaluating solutions to those obstacles. Those obstacles include (1) real versus hypothetical commodities, (2) framing, (3) commodity indivisibility, (4) diminishing marginal utility, and (5) variations in economic context. 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) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).