This paper investigates alternative approaches to constant rate discounting for calculation of Net Present Value (NPV) in life cycle cost models that are used for engineering trade studies. Alternative approaches are necessary to meet the challenge of equitable intergenerational resource allocation for projects like radioactive waste disposal that have a life cycle that impacts future generatio...

In this information age, messages related to time, and uncertainty surround us. At the same time, our daily lives are filled with decisions accompanied by temporal delay or uncertainty. Will such information influence our temporal and probabilistic discounting? The authors address this question from the perspectives of decision by sampling (DbS) theory and psychological distance theory. Studies...

Psychological disengagement is the defensive detachment of self-esteem from a particular domain. In the academic arena, disengagement can result from devaluing academic success or discounting the validity of academic outcomes. We review evidence for ethnic differences in these two processes of psychological disengagement and present results of a multiethnic study examining perceived ethnic inju...

Discounting is a causal-reasoning phenomenon in which increasing confidence in the likelihood of a particular cause decreases confidence in the likelihood of all other causes. This article provides evidence that individuals apply discounting principles to making causal attributions about internal cognitive states. In particular, the three studies reported show that individuals will fail to use ...

We review behavioral- and neuroeconomic research that identifies temporal discounting as an important component in the development and maintenance of drug addiction. First, we review behavioral economic research that explains and documents the contribution of temporal discounting to addiction. This is followed with recent insights from neuroeconomics that may provide an explanation of why drug-...

Previous research on college students has found that cooperation in iterated prisoner's dilemma game is correlated with preference for delayed rewards in studies of temporal discounting. The present study attempted to replicate this finding in a drug-dependent population. Thirty-one individuals who intranasally abuse prescription opioids participated in temporal discounting and iterated prisone...

Human preferences are found to be characterized by a neglect of impacts occuring in the future or at a distance. Concerning the spatial dimension, diffusion of pollution may justify this reduced concern. There are many cases, however, where spatial discounting is not justified. Such cases increase in importance with eased world trade, when consumers become responsible for impact increasingly lo...

An important question in economics is how people choose between different payments the future. The classical normative model predicts that a decision maker discounts later payment relative to an earlier one by exponential function of time them. Descriptive models use nonexponential functions fit observed behavioral phenomena, such as preference reversal. Here we propose discounting, consistent ...

Many factors point to the underlying instability of preferences in choice behavior. In particular, discounting reveals some effects not consistent with stable preferences. In discounting, the subjective value of a reward reduces as the uncertainty of or delay to obtaining it increases. The function relating subjective value to delay or probability must be exponential with a constant discount ra...

Heuristic models have been proposed for many domains involving choice. We conducted an out-of-sample, cross-validated comparison of heuristic models of intertemporal choice (which can account for many of the known intertemporal choice anomalies) and discounting models. Heuristic models outperformed traditional utility-discounting models, including models of exponential and hyperbolic discountin...