DeGrandpre R J, Bickel W K, Hughes J R, Layng M P, Badger G
Department of Psychiatry, University of Vermont, Burlington 05401.
J Exp Anal Behav. 1993 Nov;60(3):641-66. doi: 10.1901/jeab.1993.60-641.
In this paper, we applied the behavioral-economic concept of unit price to the study of reinforcer magnitude in an attempt to provide a consistent account of the effects of reinforcer magnitude on behavior. Recent research in the experimental analysis of behavior and in behavioral pharmacology suggests that reinforcer magnitude interacts with the schedule of reinforcement to determine response rate and total consumption. The utility of the unit-price concept thus stems from its ability to quantify this interaction as a cost-benefit ratio (i.e., unit price = characteristics of the schedule of reinforcement divided by magnitude of reinforcement). Research employing the unit-price concept has shown that as unit price increases, a positively decelerating function exists for consumption (i.e., a function with an increasingly negative slope, when plotted on log coordinates) and a bitonic function exists for response rate. Based on these findings, the present analysis applied the unit-price concept to those studies of reinforcer magnitude and drug self-administration that examined the effects of reinforcer magnitude on response rate using simple schedules of reinforcement (e.g., fixed-ratio schedule). This resulted in three findings: (a) Reinforcer-magnitude manipulations and schedule manipulations interact in a manner that can be quantified in terms of unit price as benefit and cost factors, respectively; (b) different reinforcer-magnitude manipulations are functionally interchangeable as benefit factors in the unit-price ratio; and (c) these conclusions appear warranted despite the differences in reinforcers (food or drug), species (dogs, monkeys, or rats), and schedules (interval or ratio), and despite the fact that these studies were not designed for a unit-price analysis. In methodological terms, these results provide further evidence that employing the unit-price concept is a parsimonious method for examining the effects of reinforcer magnitude. In theoretical terms, these results suggest that a single process may underlie the effect of combined reinforcer-magnitude and schedule manipulations.
在本文中，我们将单价这一行为经济学概念应用于强化物大小的研究，试图对强化物大小对行为的影响给出一个连贯的解释。行为实验分析和行为药理学方面的最新研究表明，强化物大小与强化程序相互作用，以决定反应率和总消费量。单价概念的效用因此源于其将这种相互作用量化为成本效益比的能力（即单价=强化程序的特征除以强化物大小）。采用单价概念的研究表明，随着单价的增加，消费量呈现正减速函数（即在对数坐标上绘制时斜率越来越负的函数），反应率呈现双调函数。基于这些发现，本分析将单价概念应用于那些强化物大小和药物自我给药的研究，这些研究使用简单的强化程序（如固定比率程序）来检验强化物大小对反应率的影响。这产生了三个发现：（a）强化物大小操纵和程序操纵以一种可以分别根据单价量化为效益和成本因素的方式相互作用；（b）不同的强化物大小操纵在单价比率中作为效益因素在功能上是可互换的；（c）尽管强化物（食物或药物）、物种（狗、猴子或大鼠）和程序（间隔或比率）存在差异，尽管这些研究并非为单价分析而设计，但这些结论似乎是合理的。从方法学角度来看，这些结果进一步证明，采用单价概念是检验强化物大小影响的一种简洁方法。从理论角度来看，这些结果表明，单一过程可能是强化物大小和程序操纵联合作用的基础。
