Overconsumption as a function of how individuals make choices: A paper in honor of Howard Rachlin's contributions to psychology

Howard Rachlin's widely influential behavioral economic approach to self-control and related issues provides the model for this submission. The topic is overconsumption. Current human consumption levels are unsustainable. Explanations typically focus on societal factors, such as the seductive power of advertising and/or misguided tax policies. However, the effectiveness of these factors depends on the degree to which individuals are susceptible to the message: "consume more." Humans are not blank slates. This paper argues that how individuals frame their choices establishes the susceptibility to overconsume. According to economic theory, consumers frame their options as bundles, composed of different combinations of the available items and activities. This leads to maximizing. In experiments, participants tend to frame their options as "either-or" choices. This leads to the matching law. Mathematical models of concurrent schedule choice procedures show that (1) the matching law implies overconsumption of the most preferred option and (2) that individuals will persist in preferring their favorite option even when doing so reduces overall reward rates. Given that the matching law better describes how individuals choose than does maximizing, the mathematical models of widely used choice procedures help explain why efforts to increase consumption have been more influential than efforts to control consumption.

Operant Matching as a Nash Equilibrium of an Intertemporal Game

Over the past several decades, economists, psychologists, and neuroscientists have conducted experiments in which a subject, human or animal, repeatedly chooses between alternative actions and is rewarded based on choice history. While individual choices are unpredictable, aggregate behavior typically follows Herrnstein's matching law: the average reward per choice is equal for all chosen alternatives. In general, matching behavior does not maximize the overall reward delivered to the subject, and therefore matching appears inconsistent with the principle of utility maximization. Here we show that matching can be made consistent with maximization by regarding the choices of a single subject as being made by a sequence of multiple selves—one for each instant of time. If each self is blind to the state of the world and discounts future rewards completely, then the resulting game has at least one Nash equilibrium that satisfies both Herrnstein's matching law and the unpredictability of individual choices. This equilibrium is, in general, Pareto suboptimal, and can be understood as a mutual defection of the multiple selves in an intertemporal prisoner's dilemma.

The mathematical assumptions about the multiple selves should not be interpreted literally as psychological assumptions. Human and animals do remember past choices and care about future rewards. However, they may be unable to comprehend or take into account the relationship between past and future. This can be made more explicit when a mechanism that converges on the equilibrium, such as reinforcement learning, is considered.

Using specific examples, we show that there exist behaviors that satisfy the matching law but are not Nash equilibria. We expect that these behaviors will not be observed experimentally in animals and humans. If this is the case, the Nash equilibrium formulation can be regarded as a refinement of Herrnstein's matching law.