On the behavioral economics of medication choice: A research story.

Behavioral economics has been consistently useful in describing a wide range of clinical phenomena, particularly in reference to behavioral excesses such as substance abuse, problematic gambling and obesity/overeating. Given an opportunity to explore these processes as they relate to treatment adherence in patients with multiple sclerosis (MS), our central thesis was that behavioral economic tools/processes that have been helpful in other areas of application (e.g., substance abuse, obesity) could be leveraged to help understand treatment non-adherence and hopefully lead to efforts to combat it. The current paper tells a story of how an interdisciplinary set of researchers came to combine their separate expertise in MS and behavioral economics to yield novel insights into the failures of treatment adherence often experienced in this clinical population.