The use of a constant discount rate to study long-lived environmental problems such as global warming has two disadvantages: the prescribed policy is sensitive to the discount rate, and with moderate discount rates, large future damages have almost no effect on current decisions. Timeconsistent quasi-hyperbolic discounting alleviates both of these modeling problems, and is a plausible descripti...

The article questions the methodology of " economics and psychology " in its focus on the case of hyperbolic discounting. Using some experimental results, I argue that the same type of evidence, which rejects the standard constant discount utility functions, can just as easily reject hyperbolic discounting as well. Furthermore, a decision-making procedure based on similarity relations better ex...

Abstract. We design experiments to jointly elicit risk and time preferences for the adult Danish population. We find that joint elicitation results in estimates of discount rates that are dramatically lower than those found in previous studies. Estimation of latent time preferences requires that one specify a theoretical structure to understand risk and time choices, but we show that our main r...

Is the observed large increase in consumer indebtedness since the 1980s beneficial for U.S. consumers? This paper quantitatively studies the macroeconomic and welfare implications of relaxing borrowing constraints when consumers exhibit a hyperbolic discounting preference. The model can capture two contrasting views: the positive view, which links increased indebtedness to financial innovation ...

Heuristic models have been proposed for many domains of choice. We compare heuristic models of intertemporal choice, which can account for many of the known intertemporal choice anomalies, to discounting models. We conduct an out-of-sample, cross-validated comparison of intertemporal choice models. Heuristic models outperform traditional utility discounting models, including models of exponenti...