The R package beezdemand: Behavioral Economic Easy Demand

Perspect Behav Sci. 2018 Dec 12;42(1):163-180. doi: 10.1007/s40614-018-00187-7. eCollection 2019 Mar.

Abstract

beezdemand: Behavioral Economic Easy Demand, a novel package for performing behavioral economic analyses, is introduced and evaluated. beezdemand extends the statistical program to facilitate many of the analyses performed in studies of behavioral economic demand. The package supports commonly used options for modeling operant demand and performs data screening, fits models of demand, and calculates numerous measures relevant to applied behavioral economists. The free and open source beezdemand package is compared to commercially available software (i.e., GraphPad Prism™) using peer-reviewed and simulated data. The results of this study indicated that beezdemand provides results consistent with commonly used commercial software but provides a wider range of methods and functionality desirable to behavioral economic researchers. A brief overview of the package is presented, its functionality is demonstrated, and considerations for its use are discussed.

Keywords: R programming language; behavioral economics; behavioral science; demand; free and open source software; purchase task.