Human preferences are found to be characterized by a neglect of impacts occuring in the future or at a distance. Concerning the spatial dimension, diffusion of pollution may justify this reduced concern. There are many cases, however, where spatial discounting is not justified. Such cases increase in importance with eased world trade, when consumers become responsible for impact increasingly lo...

An important question in economics is how people choose between different payments the future. The classical normative model predicts that a decision maker discounts later payment relative to an earlier one by exponential function of time them. Descriptive models use nonexponential functions fit observed behavioral phenomena, such as preference reversal. Here we propose discounting, consistent ...

Many factors point to the underlying instability of preferences in choice behavior. In particular, discounting reveals some effects not consistent with stable preferences. In discounting, the subjective value of a reward reduces as the uncertainty of or delay to obtaining it increases. The function relating subjective value to delay or probability must be exponential with a constant discount ra...

Heuristic models have been proposed for many domains involving choice. We conducted an out-of-sample, cross-validated comparison of heuristic models of intertemporal choice (which can account for many of the known intertemporal choice anomalies) and discounting models. Heuristic models outperformed traditional utility-discounting models, including models of exponential and hyperbolic discountin...

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We show that observed choices in discounting experiments are consistent with roughly one-half of the subjects using exponential discounting and one-half using quasi-hyperbolic discounting. We characterize the latent data generating process using a mixture model which allows different subjects to behave consistently with each model. Our results have substantive implications for the assumptions m...

Social decision making (e.g. social discounting and social preferences) has been attracting attention in economics, econophysics, social physics, behavioral psychology and neuroeconomics. This paper proposes a novel social discounting model based on the deformed algebra developed in the Tsallis' non-extensive thermostatistics. Furthermore, it is suggested that this model can be utilized to quan...

We present the first revealed-preference characterizations of the models of exponential discounting, quasi-hyperbolic discounting, and other time-separable models of consumers’ intertemporal decisions. We contribute to the axiomatic work that tries to describe the behavioral content of models of intertemporal choice. Ours is the first axiomatization of these models taking finite consumption str...

Interpreting Time Horizon Effects in Inter-Temporal Choice We compare different designs that have been used to test for an impact of time horizon on discounting, using real incentives and two representative data sets. With the most commonly used type of design we replicate the typical finding of declining (hyperbolic) discounting, but with other designs find constant or increasing discounting. ...

Six hens pecked a key (Experiment 1) or pushed a door (Experiment 2) to obtain food reinforcement. In both experiments and as an analogue of price changes, the response requirements were varied in two ways: by increasing the number of responses required and by increasing the required force of each response. The two price manipulations (response number and response force) had different effects o...