Study objective: Behavioral economics has contributed to the study of behavior by showing that a behavioral experiment is an economic system that can be characterized as an open or closed economy, that reinforcers can be distinguished by the concept of elasticity, that reinforcers may interact as substitutes or complements, and that a simple choice rule, such as matching, canonly account for choice between substitutable reinforcers. Just as behavioral economics was created from the interaction of behavior analysis and economics,behavior economics will develop by interacting with new research areas withineconomics, such as experimental economics and evolutionary economics.

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Study objective: Within behavior analysis, behavioral economics was formed from 4 research streams: the ecological approach to feeding behavior, traditional economic psychological research on and economic analyses of token economies, the pursuit of quantitative definitions for the relativity of reinforcement, and extended studies on the matching law. Behavioral economics had 3 important products: new indices for the efficacy of reinforcers, procedural and theoretical distinctions among experimental conditions, and an optimal theory of choice behavior. This last, most influential result promoted teleological behaviorism as an alternative to radical and theoretical behaviorism. However, it also inherited 2 problems from economics: bounded rationality and uncertainty. Experimental economics and evolutionary economics are 2 candidates that may overcome these problems. These fields have made use of a game-analytic approach for their experimental and theoretical framework. Evolutionary economics is an especially attractive research field for behavior analysis because it can provide an evolutionary game, including an idea of bounded rationality, as a new simulation tool for choice behavior and various concepts of the evolutionary process which are different from a biological framework.

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Study objective: Price and income studies in behavioral economics were evaluated through a review of experiments on animal consumption behavior. Demand curve analysis revealed that exchangeability in the unit price between cost and benefit factors, and functional equivalence between effort- and time-costs manipulated by the reinforcement schedules held only for a moderate range of prices. These functional relations among the experimental manipulations corresponded to 2 functions in human currency: a medium of exchange, and a measure of value. The income variable, which was manipulated by constraints on the total amount of reinforcers within a session, showed similar effectson animals' consuming behavior as with humans' consuming behavior using currency. However, functional equivalence among income manipulations does not appear to have been studied. Systematic studies to specify the shape of the income-consumption curve are necessary. It is supposed that the effects of income constraint will be shown further by analyzing an efficient food-intake or a change in food preference as evidence of behavioral allocation.

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Study objective: The present experiments investigated the effects of absolute reinforcer amounts, weight level, and economic conditions on rats' choices between 2 alternatives differing in reinforcer amount. In Experiments 1 and 3, a relatively smaller supplemental food was provided after each session (open-economy condition) and a shorter session time was used (closed-economy condition) to maintain weight at about 80% of free-feeding weights, while in Experiment 2, a relatively larger supplemental food and longer session time were used to maintain weight at about 95% of free-feeding weights. A demand curve analysis was applied to the relation between food consumption and responding, in addition to an analysis of preference. Rats' preferences differed only between a 1:3-pellet and a 4:12-pellet condition. The slope of demand functions obtained was steeper in the open-economy condition than in the closed-economy condition, irrespective of the difference in weight. These results indicate that the slopes of demand functions are determined by differences in economic conditions, either open or closed economies, as defined, for rats, by the absence or presence of supplemental food.

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Study objective: The present paper reviews some relations between behavioral economics and resistance to change. Elasticity of demand is reanalyzed in terms of resistance to change, and vice versa. The results suggest that the slopes of the functions obtained from demand curves and resistance to change are quite similar.A study comparing resistance to change in open and closed economies showed no consistent differences. However, this study requires reexamination, because of some problems with the procedure. In relation to labor supply, the substitution effect that is expressed by decreases in responding under price change was reanalyzed in terms of resistanceto change. It was found that when leisure is extensively substituted for income, responding is less resistant to change. These analyses suggest that a behavioral economic approach generally agrees with an approach based on resistance to change.

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Study objective: "Time preference" and "temporal discounting" refer to a decrease in the subjective value of a reward as the delay to its receipt increases. Economics and psychology have attempted to explain this phefnomenon from different viewpoints and with different methods. In economics, early researchers on time preference proposed exponential functions to show rational allocations of consumption between the present and the future. However, recent research on time preference has reported anomalies that cannot be described by exponential functions, and so new discounting models have been proposed that can describe these anomalies. In psychology, animal and human temporal discounting are considered to be described better by hyperbolic functions than by exponential ones. Economic variables correlating to the discounting rate have been reported. Economic researchers have to measure discounting rate in real-choice situations. It is expected that, in both economics and psychology, temporal discounting research will be integrated into an interdisciplinary research area that brings further understanding of this phenomenon.

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Study objective: Traditional and more recent research on choice behavior has restricted the experimental procedures in three ways: restrictions on static properties of the alternatives and choice behavior; a disproportionate emphasis on reinforcers and reinforcement schedules; and disregard of possible regular variability or sequences in the participants' choices. After examining several recent studies that included procedures that might overcome these restrictions, we propose a predictive game task composed of two types of discriminative stimuli (predictive and reporting stimuli) and two types of responses (choice and performing responses). After a brief introduction describing game theory for analyzing choice behavior in predictive game tasks as normative theory, we discuss experimental procedures corresponding to five components of game theory:players, payoff matrices, alternatives, moves and strategies, initial conditions, and playing procedures. Based on this discussion, we conclude that the predictive game task is appropriate for a wide range of experimental procedures.

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Study objective: The present paper describes how basic concepts of behavioral economics, such as unit price, demand curve, and price elasticity, can be applied in order to understand smoking, drinking, and drug taking behavior. Economic variables known to affect consumer behavior: price,substitutability, income, and delay discounting, and treatment implications of the concepts of behavioral economics, are discussed. Within a behavioral economics framework, in order to reduce the occurrence of drug-obtaining behavior, the behavior of persons who are drug dependent should be shaped with the use of acceptable reinforcers. The effectiveness of treatment depends on several economic factors, including substitutability between the two sources of reinforcement, and the availability of desirable complements to the acceptable reinforcers so as to maximize their effectiveness. The results of behavioral economic studies also have implications for the formulation of public policy on drug abuse.

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