An Experimental Study On Delayed Discounting Effect Of Time Versus Money

When several alternatives are different in multiple dimensions (such as amounts, occurrence time and the degree of uncertainty etc), it is necessary for decision makers to make tradeoffs among these dimensions, so different preference or aptitude of choice may occur. Some researchers thought that such choices concerning multiple dimensions can be explained from the perspective of discounting in some degree. Here "discounting" means that subjective value of an outcome may be increasingly less that the objective value when an outcome is more delayed or more risky (uncertain). Discounting rate refers to the rate that someone discounts delayed or risky (uncertain) outcomes.The last 2 decades have seen the growth of a large body of research on choice behavior from the perspective of discounting. Much research mainly concerns the discounting of delayed and uncertain (risky) outcomes, in order to examine how people make tradeoffs among these dimensions and different preference of choice. That someone discounts delayed outcomes is called delay discounting or temporal discounting, and probability discounting with respect to uncertain or risky outcomes.The economic discounting utility model (Samuelson, 1937) has formed the basis of previous research on delay discounting. The model implies two basic assumptions: first, delay discounting is same at different time points, that is temporal independence; second, delay discounting is independent of different resources or domains, that is to say, for different resources we should observe different discounting rate. However there is abundant evidence that delay discounting is not temporally independent and ambiguous evidence with respect to resource independence.