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Temporal discounting (also known as delay discounting, time discounting) [12] is the tendency of people to discount rewards as they approach a temporal horizon in the future or the past (i.e., become so distant in time that they cease to be valuable or to have addictive effects). To put it another way, it is a tendency to give greater value to ...
The phenomenon of hyperbolic discounting is implicit in Richard Herrnstein's "matching law", which states that when dividing their time or effort between two non-exclusive, ongoing sources of reward, most subjects allocate in direct proportion to the rate and size of rewards from the two sources, and in inverse proportion to their delays. [8]
Time discounting or temporal discounting is a wide range of ideas involving the connection between time and the extent to which an object, situation, or course of action is seen as valuable. The overall theory is that people put more value and worth into immediate events and outcomes, and apply less value to future outcomes or events.
The first experiment in delayed gratification was conducted by Walter Mischel and Ebbe B. Ebbesen at Stanford University in 1970. [11] The purpose of the study was to understand when the control of delayed gratification, the ability to wait to obtain something that one wants, develops in children.
Hyperbolic discounting, where discounting is the tendency for people to have a stronger preference for more immediate payoffs relative to later payoffs. Hyperbolic discounting leads to choices that are inconsistent over time—people make choices today that their future selves would prefer not to have made, despite using the same reasoning. [52]
Exponential discounting yields time-consistent preferences. Exponential discounting and, more generally, time-consistent preferences are often assumed in rational choice theory, since they imply that all of a decision-maker's selves will agree with the choices made by each self. Any decision that the individual makes for himself in advance will ...
It is calculated as the present discounted value of future utility, and for people with time preference for sooner rather than later gratification, it is less than the future utility. The utility of an event x occurring at future time t under utility function u, discounted back to the present (time 0) using discount factor β, is
The pragmatic factor usually results in a "pure time preference" factor in the social discount rate, that a pleasurable experience at a certain date is intrinsically more valuable than the exact same experience at a later date, and that the life of a person born sooner has more intrinsic value than the life of a person born later.