Humans often prefer a small immediate reward to large reward in the future. This myopic tendency in inter-temporal choice is termed delay discounting, and has been the focus of intensive research in the past decades. Recent studies indicate that the neural regions underlying delay discounting are influenced by the gonadal steroids. However, the specific relationship between the testosterone lev...

BACKGROUND Monetary delay discounting is a measure of impulsivity associated with substance use and abuse, problem gambling, and other health-related outcomes. More recently, delay discounting has been shown to be associated with risky sexual behavior. We analyzed survey data from men who have sex with men who completed a monetary discounting task and reported sexual behaviors in the previous 1...

The delay discounting paradigm was used to examine its utility in understanding motivational factors among socially anxious individuals. Participants (n=88) who reported high and low levels of social anxiety were randomly assigned to either a social threat or non-threat condition and their subsequent rates of discounting were examined. A significant difference in rates of discounting was found ...

In economics, the concept of time discounting introduces weights on future goods to make these less valuable. Yet, both the conceptual motivation for time discounting and its specific functional form remain contested. To address these problems, this paper provides a measurement-theoretic framework of representation for time discounting. The representation theorem characterises time discounting ...

In this paper we elicit preferences for discounting via experimental techniques. We then estimate a general speci…cation of discounting that nests exponential and hyperbolic discounting, as well as various forms of present bias, including quasihyperbolic discounting. The data strongly favor a speci…cation with a small present bias in the form of a …xed cost, of the order of $4 on average across...

A mathematical formalism is developed for the existence of unique invariants associated with wide classes of observed discounting behavior. These invariants are ‘exponential discount rate spectra,’ derived from the theory of completely monotone functions. Exponential discounting, the empirically important case of hyperbolic discounting, and so-called sub-additive discounting are each special ca...

0092-6566/$ see front matter 2008 Elsevier Inc doi:10.1016/j.jrp.2008.07.005 * Corresponding author. Fax: +1 416 978 4811. E-mail address: [email protected] (J.B. Hir Delay discounting describes the extent to which the value of a reward decreases as the delay to obtaining that reward increases. Lower discounting rates predict better outcomes in social, academic, and health domains. The cu...

Article history: Received 28 January 2008 Available online xxxx JEL classification: C91 D03 D90 In this paper we elicit preferences for money–time pairs via experimental techniques. We estimate a general specification of discounting that nests exponential and hyperbolic discounting, as well as various forms of present bias, including quasi-hyperbolic discounting. We find that discount rates are...

Several experiments on human causal reasoning have demonstrated "discounting"--that the presence of a strong alternative cause may decrease the perceived efficacy of a moderate target cause. Some, but not all, of these effects have been shown to be attributable to subjects' use of conditional rather than unconditional contingencies (i.e., subjects control for alternative causes). We review expe...