The Research Of Intertemporal Decision Making Based On Different Levels Of Love Of Money

Intertemporal choices are decisions that involve tradeoffs among costs and benefits occurring at different times(Loewenstein,1988;Frederick,Loewenstein, &0’Donoghue, 2002). Through literature review, we find many scholars have done the research on the influence factors of it, such as emotion, big five personality, self-control, time perception and so on. While there is no scholar talking about individual’s different preference of money. Therefore, this study treats the difference as an important factor. And using the method of questionnaire and behavioral experiment to test the relation between the difference and intertemporal decision making.This research is made up of two studies. Study 1:Using two questionnaires, love of money scale and intertemporal task questionnaire, to find whether there is a relation between love of money and intertemporal choice. Meanwhile, selecting representative subjects to enter into next study. Study 2:Firstly, giving subjects a test again with love of money scale to make sure what they choose from scale are real. Secondly, verifying the relation by behavioral experiment. Based on existed research, this study uses three-factor mixed design. Stimulus program is presented and controlled by E-prime, it concludes three blocks which contain 48 trials. Certainly, all subjects are willing and know the principle of confidentiality. At the same time, they will be rewarded for their participation.Conclusions of this research are as follow:(1) The overall level of college students’ love of money is high. Girls’ money motivation scores are significantly higher than boys. As a whole, students who learn liberal arts are significantly higher than those learning science and engineering. Compared to other grade, senior students’ level is highest.(2) There is a significant negative correlation between love of money and intertemporal discounting tendency. That means the higher person’s level of love of money the lower his time-discounting.(3) No matter what the task is, people with high level of love of money tend to choose more larger-later rewards than those with low level.(4) There is no significant difference in reaction time of intertemporal choice between them. While their reaction time are significantly affected by the difficulty of task. The reaction time of subjects in difficult task is significantly longer than that in easy task.