The R package beezdemand: Behavioral Economic Easy Demand
Use the free beezdemand R package to get fast, publication-ready demand curves that match pricey software.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Kaplan and colleagues built a free R package called beezdemand.
It turns raw demand-curve data into clean graphs and numbers.
You feed in price and consumption; it spits out elasticity, Pmax, and breakpoint.
They checked the math against costly commercial software.
What they found
beezdemand gave the same elasticity values as the paid tools.
It also added extras: income-compensated curves, boot-strapped confidence bands, and batch processing.
One line of code replaces hours of hand entry.
How this fits with other research
Mukherjee et al. (2015) urged clinicians to share precise behavioral data.
beezdemand answers that call by giving everyone the same ruler for free.
Dykens et al. (1991) plotted how rats cut phencyclidine intake when saccharin got cheaper.
Their curves are exactly what beezdemand now fits in seconds.
Iwata et al. (1990) showed that open vs. closed economies change response rates.
beezdemand lets you model both settings without buying extra modules.
Why it matters
If you run demand assessments, switch to beezdemand tomorrow.
It costs nothing, saves time, and gives clearer reports to parents and payers.
You can batch-analyze a whole clinic’s data before lunch and spot which reinforcers are losing power.
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02At a glance
03Original 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.
Perspectives on Behavior Science, 2019 · doi:10.1007/s40614-018-00187-7