Herrnstein, R. J. (1970).
On the law of effect.
Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior,
13, 243-266.
Experiments on single, multiple, and concurrent schedules of
reinforcement find various correlations between the rate of
responding and the rate or magnitude of reinforcement. For
concurrent schedules (i.e., simultaneous choice procedures),
there is matching between the relative frequencies of responding
and reinforcement; for multiple schedules (i.e., successive
discrimination procedures), there are contrast effects between
responding in each component and reinforcement in the others; and
for single schedules, there are a host of increasing monotonic
relations between the rate of responding and the rate of
reinforcement. All these results, plus several others, can be
accounted for by a coherent system of equations, the most general
of which states that the absolute rate of any response is
proportional to its associated relative reinforcement.