BACKGROUND Increasing evidence suggests that delay discounting may change following effective interventions. Nonetheless, previous studies that assessed the effect of contingency management (CM) on delay discounting are scarce, and their results are mixed. The current study assessed whether CM in conjunction with a cognitive-behavioral treatment (CBT) for smoking cessation was associated with c...

We study continuous-time stochastic games (with finitely many states and actions), with a focus on the existence of their equilibria that are insensitive to a small imprecision in the specification of players’ evaluations of streams of payoffs. We show that the stationary, namely, time-independent, discounting game has a stationary equilibrium, that the (not necessarily stationary) discounting ...

Humans and other animals discount the value of future rewards, a phenomenon known as delay discounting. Individuals vary widely in the extent to which they discount future rewards, and these tendencies have been associated with important life outcomes. Recent studies have demonstrated that imagining the future reduces subsequent discounting behavior, but no research to date has examined whether...

Organisms prefer to receive rewards sooner rather than later because they excessively discount the subjective value of future rewards, a phenomenon called delay discounting. Recent studies have reported an association between cortisol-which is secreted by the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis-and delay discounting. However, no study has examined whether acutely induced psychosocial stre...

A growing literature indicates that impulsivity is a fundamental behavioral process that underlies obesity. However, impulsivity is a multidimensional construct, which comprises independent patterns of decision-making that could be uniquely associated with obesity. No research to date has clarified whether obesity is differentially associated with specific behavioral aspects of impulsivity. Thi...

Excessive discounting of future rewards has been related to a variety of risky behaviors and adverse clinical conditions. Prior work examining delay discounting in schizophrenia suggests an elevated discount rate. However, it remains uncertain whether this reflects the disease process itself or an underlying genetic vulnerability, whether it is selective for delay discounting or reflects pervas...

The aim of this study was to examine delay discounting in girls and boys with ADHD-Combined type (ADHD-C) relative to typically developing (TD) children on two tasks that differ in the extent to which the rewards and delays were experienced by participants. Children ages 8-12 years with ADHD-C (n=65; 19 girls) and TD controls (n=55; 15 girls) completed two delay discounting tasks involving a se...

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...

Discounted Cost Register Automata (DCRA) associate costs with strings in a regular manner using the operation of discounted sum. The min-cost optimization problem for DCRAs corresponds to computing shortest paths in graphs with more general forms of discounting than the well-studied notion of future discounting. We present solutions to two classes of such shortest path problems: in presence of ...

When asked to choose between immediate and delayed rewards or costs, both human and (other) animal respondents will equate a small reward sooner with a larger one later. This is the well-known phenomenon of individual “discounting.” The capital interest rates that prevail in market economies are a related phenomenon. Most economists agree that “social” discounting should be applied to compare c...