The clinical utility of delay discounting and demand as therapeutic targets for improving health behaviors: A scoping review
Year: 2026
Type: other
Abstract: Background: Our health is shaped by diverse behaviors including tobacco, alcohol, and other substance use, diet, and physical activity. Traditional behavior change therapeutic targets include knowledge, skills, attitudes, motivation, self-efficacy, etc. Behavioral economic principles, such as delay discounting and demand are relatively new targets for health behavior change. Delay discounting is the process whereby commodities (e.g., substances, food, etc.) lose their value as a function of the time to receipt. Demand reflects the value of commodities in terms of how much money, time, or effort someone will expend to obtain them. These principles represent underlying processes generalizable to a wide variety of problematic or unhealthy behaviors; however, the clinical utility of these principles has yet to be explicated. Objectives: This review will identify and describe evidence for the clinical utility of targeting delay discounting and/or demand for changing health behaviors. We aim to identify the relevant published literature, examine how research in this domain is being conducted, describe and quantify results, and identify knowledge gaps. Methods: Article inclusion criteria included a randomized or counterbalanced design comparing at least two intervention conditions intended to improve a health behavior and modify delayed discounting and/or demand, and results that include changes in delay discounting and/or demand and changes in the identified health behavior from baseline. Search strategies will be applied to PubMed and Web of Science in addition to manual searches of related articles. Search results will be imported into specialized software to manage, track, and record the execution of the review. The evidence will be synthesized into a table that documents study characteristics and outcomes. Articles will be classified into meaningful groups based on health behavior and delay discounting and demand outcomes. Conclusions: This review will is expected to advance this work by identifying specific questions about the extent of the evidence including how research in this domain is being conducted; how delay discounting and demand are measured and calculated; how changes in health behaviors, delay discounting, and demand outcomes are quantified; and finally, to identify knowledge gaps. These findings are expected to provide insights into the extent of the literature, to identify gaps and trends in the evidence, and to generate novel ideas for future directions.
Source: Open Science Framework
Institution: Virginia Tech
Subfield: General Decision Sciences
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7213212974
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