Analyses of delay discounting (the process by which delayed rewards have lower subjective values than sooner rewards of the same magnitude) have become increasingly popular due to their ability to allow researchers to investigate the temporal properties of reward for socially important problems (see ).
The goal of this technical article is to present researchers with a tutorial on how to conduct both nonlinear regression and area under the curve (AUC) estimations using Microsoft Office Excel 2010 and Excel for Mac 2011 (hereafter referred to simply as Excel) to analyze delay-discounting data. This tutorial is intended to encourage the quantitative analysis of behavior in both research and applied settings by readers with relatively little formal training in nonlinear regression. The purpose of this article is to provide readers with a brief tutorial on how to use Microsoft Office Excel 2010 and Excel for Mac 2011 to analyze discounting data to yield parameters for both the hyperbolic discounting model and area under the curve. In recent years, researchers and practitioners in the behavioral sciences have profited from a growing literature on delay discounting.
