THE EFFECTS OF DIFFERING RESPONSE TYPES AND PRICE MANIPULATIONS ON DEMAND MEASURES

Abstract

Animals' behavioral needs have become an important component of animal welfare legislation. Behavioral economics provides a framework for the study of such needs. A function, analogous to a demand function relating consumption rate to price, can be obtained by increasing the price (or work) required for access to a commodity. This experiment investigated the effects of different response types and price manipulations on these functions. Six hens pushed a door or pecked a key for food under open economic conditions (short experimental sessions and supplementary food). In Part 1, the number of door pushes required (fixed‐ratio schedule) was increased each session, and the force needed to push the door was increased across conditions. In Part 2, the force needed to push the door was increased session to session, and the fixed‐ratio schedule was increased across conditions. In Part 3, the number of key pecks required was increased each session. Both response types produced similarly shaped (approximately linear in logarithmic coordinates and downward sloping) demand functions when price was increased by increasing the number of responses required. These imply an elastic demand for food under these conditions. In contrast, increasing the force required to push the door resulted in highly curvilinear functions. These functions indicated little change in consumption across lower door forces and abrupt drops in consumption at higher force requirements, implying mixed elasticity in the animals' demand for food. The differences between the shapes of the two functions seem to arise from the different ways that the two price manipulations alter the time taken to complete the work required. Increasing the fixed‐ratio requirement necessarily increases the time needed to complete each response unit, whereas increasing the force requirement does not. The different shapes of the functions were robust when either force or number was varied across sessions and the value of the other was varied over conditions. They were also robust when the price increases were taken from different conditions, showing that the shapes of the functions were independent of the place in the experiment in which the price was examined. Unit price (which combines number and force into a single price measure) unified the data from the two price manipulations to a large degree, producing moderately curved functions. However, there was some variance around the unit price functions, and this was attributable to the different shapes of the underlying functions. The data suggest that different price manipulations may give different measures of animal demand but that unit price might provide some unification.