Simple learning models can illuminate biased results from choice titration experiments

The choice titration procedure presents a subject with a repeated choice between a standard option that always provides the same reward and an adjusting option for which the reward schedule is adjusted based on the subject’s previous choices. The procedure is designed to determine the point of indifference between the two schedules which is then used to estimate a utility equivalence point between the two options. Analyzing the titration procedure as a Markov birth death process, we show that a large class of reinforcement learning models invariably generates a titration bias, and that the bias varies non-linearly with the reward value. We treat several titration procedures, presenting analytic results for some simple learning models and simulation results for more complex models. These results suggest that results from titration experiments are likely to be biased and that inferences based on the titration experiments may need to be reconsidered.