ABSTRACT
Most modern theories of addiction view drug self-administration as an operant that is maintained by the reinforcing properties of drugs (Schuster & ompson, 1969). Widely abused drugs such as morphine, cocaine, and ethanol reliably reinforce the behavior that leads to their administration (Schuster & ompson, 1969). A key task of any theory of drug use, however, is to predict the conditions in which drugs will be highly preferred or valued reinforcers. Behavioral economic theory uses the term reinforcing value, which in laboratory settings is quantified by the amount of behavior (e.g., lever presses, time) allocated to gain access to the reinforcer, and to describe the relative level of preference for a reinforcer such as alcohol or drugs. According to behavioral economics, the reinforcing value of a given drug is a dynamic and contextually determined function of the reinforcing effects of the drug and the availability of alternative reinforcers, rather than a fixed property of the drug or a characteristic of the individual (Bickel, Madden, & Petry, 1998; Bickel, Marsch, & Carroll, 2000; Heyman, 2003; MacKillop et al., 2008; Murphy et al., 2005; Vuchinich & Heather, 2003). us, compared to most other theories of addiction (Leonard & Blane, 1999), a distinguishing feature of behavioral economic theory is the focus on contextual determinants of drug use. Relative to theories that focus largely on stable individual differences in personality, cognitions, or biology as explanations for addiction, a strength of behavioral economics theories is their ability to account for the substantial fluctuations in drug use within an individual over time that have been repeatedly demonstrated in clinical and epidemiological research (Del Boca, Darkes, Greenbaum, & Goldman, 2004; Moos, Finney, & Cronkite, 1990; Tucker, 1999). e following sections describe several key features of behavioral economic theories of addiction.
