Steven R. Hursh, Behavioral Economics and Public Policy, SQAB
Channel: Society for the Quantitative Analyses of Behavior
Date: 13/07/2018

Chair: Derek D. Reed (University of Kansas)

Much of public policy has to do with how to formulate policy to either directly influence human behavior toward some common goal or consider the indirect effects of public policy on human behavior.  From a behavior analytic point of view, public policy designed to influence behavior can manipulate discriminative control of behavior through advertising and education, offer reinforcers as incentives to shift behavior toward more productive or healthy choices, or introduce costs or penalties to discourage destructive or unhealthy choices.  
Underlying nearly all public policy decisions is a need to understand what sorts of things people want – what do people desire and how much will they pay for the things that they desire.  Effective public policy harnesses our natural desires and directs them toward more healthy and productive outcomes by offering new and better alternatives, lowering the perceived costs of desired alternatives, and discouraging less desirable alternatives.  Framed in this way, we can see that public policy is all about behavioral economics – the science that quantifies the essential value of commodities and defines the cost/benefit relationships associated with those commodities.
In this tutorial I will explain scientific principles and methods for quantifying essential value and demand for alternative goods.  I will draw on animal studies using drugs as reinforcers, human studies of drugs as reinforcers and other commodities, and studies of both isolated demand for single goods and competing demand between several goods.  I will show extrapolations of these principles to public policy to stimulate future research and application beyond the bulk of prior research.  I will conclude by demonstrating that impulsive behavior that is also a focus of behavioral economics and public policy is, at its core, another way to look at the relative essential value of goods, with time as the dimension of cost.