Toward a Predictive Model of Success in Contingency Management: A Proof of Concept Study Utilizing Behavioral Economic, Clinical Severity, and Alcohol Use Severity Measures with Haily Traxler

Some of the variables that can kind of go into whether a contingency management intervention is going to be effective or not, as you describe in the paper, could be the behavioral economic variables.

And or even some of the like demand evaluation stuff.

Can you speak about I guess let's start with behavioral economics, how behavioral economic variables could could inform contingency management.

Yeah, I mean, so behavioral economics is really a framework for understanding reward valuation.

And so using that lens, we can look at things like how much does somebody value a substance and how changeable is that value? motivation like when when does a person become more motivated for an alternative to the substance and you know we have our kind of two standard behavioral economic interventions or models that we use which are delay discounting and the demand analysis and so using delay discounting we can just look at like how people value a smaller more immediate reward to a delayed but larger reward.

There's also ways we can modify discounting.

So it could be like probabilistic discounting.

And then the demand analysis, we're looking at how essentially kind of like how resistance to change motivation for a substance or some commodity is.

So like If we make someone work harder for something, at what point do they stop valuing it as much? So there are different ways that this plays into contingency management.

You can look at how people value money and you can look at how people value money.

money or rewards.

And you can look at how people value substances.

So when it comes to money, there might be kind of some important things that we can learn about how much someone would value an incentive and how effective that incentive is going to be over different Constraints and situations.

And then if we look at the substance, we can look at how resistant to changing behavior a person might be using a behavioral economic framework.

Because if they have a higher demand for it, or if they are more willing to take the substance, a smaller amount of the substance immediately compared to waiting for a larger amount later, like those both kind of suggests more likelihood to continue pursuing substance use.

And that might be an important factor when we're trying to motivate someone not to use the substance.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

And, you know, when I think about those ideas of like, how much does someone value drugs, right? Because if we're talking about abstinence from those drugs, knowing how high or low they value that drug is obviously potentially very informative and setting up an intervention for that.

And I think probably most people who think about issues like that, people might think of the value of drug as being like an abstract concept, right? But you're talking about fundamentally being able to quantify that and actually be able to look at an actual measure of how much someone in this case values a drug.

I think behavioral economics is so cool because it's like, you can actually mathematically model the way that someone would behave under these conditions.

Like, just, it's cool how orderly behavior is.

But yeah.

And I can imagine, too, once you get information from both delayed discounting and demand analyses, you might be able to personalize that intervention to someone specifically.

I know one of the perks of contingency management is that it can work for larger groups of people, but say someone values a substance here versus someone else values it differently, you might be able to tailor that intervention to fit their specific needs better.

Yes.