Measuring Impatience in Intertemporal Choice

Measuring Impatience in Intertemporal Choice

In general terms, decreasing impatience means decreasing discount rates. This property has been usually referred to as hyperbolic discounting, although there are other discount functions which also exhibit decreasing discount rates. This paper focuses on the measurement of the impatience associated with a discount function with the aim of establishing a methodology to compare this characteristi...

Impatience as Intertemporal Egoism

We build on a philosophical account of personal identity (Parfit, 1984) which argues that the degree of concern one has for one’s future self may be scaled by the degree of “psychological connectedness”—overlap in properties such as beliefs, values, and ideals—held between one’s current and future self. We pose participants with tradeoffs between consuming a benefit in the near future versus co...

Intertemporal Choice

Intangibility in intertemporal choice.

Since the advent of the discounted utility (DU) model, economists have thought about intertemporal choice in very specific terms. DU assumes that people make explicit trade-offs between costs and benefits occurring at different points in time. While this explicit trade-off perspective is simple and tractable, and has stimulated productive research, it does not provide a very realistic represent...

Intertemporal choice in lemurs.

Different species vary in their ability to wait for delayed rewards in intertemporal choice tasks. Models of rate maximization account for part of this variation, but other factors such as social structure and feeding ecology seem to underly some species differences. Though studies have evaluated intertemporal choice in several primate species, including Old World monkeys, New World monkeys, an...