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In behavioral economics, time preference (or time discounting, [1] delay discounting, temporal discounting, [2] long-term orientation [3]) is the current relative valuation placed on receiving a good at an earlier date compared with receiving it at a later date. [1] Applications for these preferences include finance, health, climate change.
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.
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]
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]
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.
Empirical data have suggested that exponential discounting, rewards discounting at a constant rate per unit of waiting time, only occurs when there are random interruptions in foraging. [53] Discounting can also be related to the risk sensitivity of animals. Rather than relating risk to delay, risk sensitivity acts as a function of delay ...
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 ...
The term of present bias was coined in the second half of the 20th century. In the 1930s economic research started investigating time preferences. The findings led to the model of exponential discounting, thus time consistent discounting. However, later research led to the conclusion that time preferences were indeed not consistent, but ...