BACKGROUND Temporal discounting is an important determinant of many health and financial outcomes, but we are not aware of studies that have examined the association of temporal discounting with mortality. METHODS Participants were 406 older persons without dementia from the Rush Memory and Aging Project, a longitudinal cohort study of aging. Temporal discounting was measured using standard p...

Risk aversion and temporal discounting are preferences that are strongly linked to sub-optimal financial and health decision making ability. Prior studies have shown they differ by age and cognitive ability, but it remains unclear whether differences are due to age-related cognitive decline or lower cognitive abilities over the life span. We tested the hypothesis that cognitive decline is assoc...

BACKGROUND Increased levels of delay discounting have been associated with alcoholism and problematic levels of drinking. Attempts to assess the directionality of this relationship by studying individuals with a family history of alcoholism as well as rodent lines selectively bred for high home cage alcohol preference have yielded discordant results. One possible reason for this discordance is ...

The tendency to discount the value of future rewards has become one of the best-studied constructs in the behavioral sciences. Although hyperbolic discounting remains the dominant quantitative characterization of this phenomenon, a variety of models have been proposed and consensus around the one that most accurately describes behavior has been elusive. To help bring some clarity to this issue,...

A central point of debate over environmental policies concerns how future costs and benefits should be assessed. The most commonly used method for assessing the value of future costs and benefits is economic discounting. One often-cited justification for discounting is uncertainty. More specifically, it is risk aversion coupled with the expectation that future prospects are more risky. In this ...

Can a generation’s discounting of future generations’ consumption utilities be interpreted as “pure” altruism towards future generations, that is, a concern that these are better off according to their likewise forward-looking preferences? It turns out that the answer is positive for many but not all discount functions used in the economics literature. In particular, traditional exponential dis...

A meta-analysis of the available judgment and memory data on the sleeper effect in persuasion is presented. According to this effect, when people receive a communication associated with a discounting cue, such as a noncredible source, they are less persuaded immediately after exposure than they are later in time. Findings from this meta-analysis indicate that recipients of discounting cues were...

Delay discounting is the process by which the value of an expected reward decreases as the delay to obtaining that reward increases. Individuals with higher discounting rates tend to prefer smaller immediate rewards over larger delayed rewards. Previous research has indicated that personality can influence an individual's discounting rates, with higher levels of Extraversion predicting a prefer...

In this paper, a new method is proposed to improve the canonical Katz back-off smoothing technique in language modeling. The process of Katz smoothing is detailedly analyzed and the global discounting parameters are selected for discounting. Further more, a modified version of the formula for discounting parameters is proposed, in which the discounting parameters are determined by not only the ...

AIMS To examine the moderating effects of alcohol myopia on cognitive impulsivity in humans using the delay-discounting paradigm. METHODS Seventy-six male undergraduate students were randomly assigned to sober, placebo or alcohol conditions. In the delay-discounting task, participants made a series of hypothetical choices between a small, immediate reward and a large, delayed reward. To test ...