Cross-Commodity Discounting of Monetary Outcomes and Access to Leisure Activities

Behavioral economic analyses have extended and advanced our understanding of a variety of phenomena, including demand, choice, and impulsivity. An expanding body of literature shows the application of behavioral economic concepts to many real-world concerns, such as addiction, impulsivity, safety, and consumer behavior. The present study continues in this tradition by applying a discounting approach to behaviors of relevance in the workplace. A challenge for organizations is to ensure productive workplace behaviors in the face of a constantly present source of competing reinforcement available through mobile devices. Employees can have instantaneous access to a variety of activities that may effectively interfere with productivity. To quantify the degree to which access to leisure activity via mobile devices competes with monetary outcomes associated with remaining on task, participants were given a novel discounting task using a cross-commodity discounting paradigm in which they chose between amounts of mobile device usage and monetary rewards, where one was certain and the other probabilistic. The results were consistent with those of previous cross-commodity discounting studies. Specifically, participants discounted the value of both money and access to mobile devices as a function of the probability of receipt. One implication of these findings is that probability and discounting may be important determinants of how employees allocate response efforts at work under competing contingencies of reinforcement.