Quantitative Tools

Throughout my career, I’ve developed tools and published papers to help researchers conduct different types of behavioral economic analyses. Below are some of the tools I’ve developed.

R Packages

beezdemand: Behavioral Economic (be) Easy (ez) Demand

An R package containing commonly used functions for analyzing behavioral economic demand data.

Behavioral economic demand is gaining in popularity. The motivation behind beezdemand was to create an alternative tool to conduct these analyses. This package is not necessarily meant to be a replacement for other softwares; rather, it is meant to serve as an additional tool in the behavioral economist’s toolbox. It is meant for researchers to conduct behavioral economic (be) demand the easy (ez) way.

CRAN

GitHub

Paper:

Kaplan, B. A., Gilroy, S. P., Reed. D. D., Koffarnus, M. N., & Hursh, S. R. (2019). The R package beezdemand: Behavioral Economic Easy Demand. Perspectives on Behavior Science, 42(1), 163-180. doi: 10.1007/s40614-018-00187-7

beezdiscounting: Behavioral Economic (be) Easy (ez) Discounting

An R package containing commonly used functions for analyzing behavioral economic discounting data.

The package supports scoring of the 27-Item Monetary Choice Questionnaire (see Kaplan et al., 2016) and scoring of the minute discounting task (see Koffarnus & Bickel, 2014) using the Qualtrics 5-trial discounting template (see the Qualtrics Minute Discounting User Guide), which is also available as a .qsf file in this package.

CRAN

GitHub


Shiny Apps

shinybeez: A Shiny App for Behavioral Economic (be) Easy (ez) Demand and Discounting

shinybeez is an R Shiny app that allows analyses and visualizations of behavioral economic demand and discounting data. It relies on the beezdemand and beezdiscounting R packages. In addition to a comprehensive user guide, template files, and dark mode toggle, shinybeez includes the following features:

Demand

  • Exportable descriptive table of demand data (mean, median, sd, proportion of zeros, etc.)

  • Exportable empirical measures of demand data (Intensity, BP0, BP1, Omax, Pmax)

  • Exportable table of systematic response sets (customizable bounce, trend, reversals from zero criteria)

  • Exportable table of regression results (Q0, \(\alpha\), R2, derived and exact Omax, Pmax)

  • Exportable plot in APA format of demand data and best-fit lines (customizable plot title, axis title text, pseudo-log axes) in png, pdf, svg, and more

  • Option to calculate descriptive and regression results by a grouping variable

  • Choose between the exponential model of demand or the exponentiated model of demand

  • Select various k values (1-4, individual k, fitted k, empirical range of data)

  • Choose between Fit to Group (pooled), Fit to Group (mean), and Two Stage

Discounting

  • Choose between scoring the 27-Item Monetary Choice Questionnaire (MCQ), the 5-trial minute task for delay discounting, and the 5-trial minute task for probability discounting

  • Score the 27-Item MCQ identically to that of the 27-Item MCQ Automated Scorer in Microsoft Excel

  • Choose various methods to impute missing data for the 27-Item MCQ

  • Choose between no transformation, log10, transformation, and natural log transformation

  • Exportable table of MCQ results (overall, small, medium, large, and geomean (i.e., composite) k values; overall, small, medium, large, and composite consistency; overall, small, medium, and large proportion of LDR/LL chosen; and the imputation method)

  • Exportable table of summary statistics (mean, sd, sem)

  • Exportable table of correlations between small, medium, and large magnitudes

  • Exportable table of imputed data when imputing missing data

  • Exportable plot in APA format of proportion of SIR/SS choices by k value rank

  • Exportable plot in APA format of box plot of k values

GitHub

Paper:

Kaplan, B. A. & Reed. D. D. (under review). shinybeez: A Shiny App for Behavioral Economic Easy Demand and Discounting


Other Tools

Kaplan, B. A., Lemley, S. M., Reed, D. D., & Jarmolowicz, D. P. (2014) 21- and 27-item Monetary Choice Questionnaire automated scorer [Microsoft Excel].

Kaplan, B. A. & Reed, D. D. (2014) Essential value, Pmax, and Omax automated calculator [Microsoft Excel].