Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/37407 
Year of Publication: 
2010
Series/Report no.: 
Beiträge zur Jahrestagung des Vereins für Socialpolitik 2010: Ökonomie der Familie - Session: Consumer Behaviour and Intertemporal Choice No. G17-V3
Publisher: 
Verein für Socialpolitik, Frankfurt a. M.
Abstract: 
Many empirical studies on intertemporal choice report preference reversals in the sense that a preference between a small reward to be received soon and a larger reward to be received later reverses as both rewards are equally delayed. Such preference reversals are commonly interpreted as contradicting constant discounting. This interpretation is correct only if baseline consumption to which the outcomes are added, remains constant over time. The difficulty with measuring discounting when baseline consumption changes over time, is that delaying an outcome has two effects: (1) due to the change in baseline consumption, it changes the extra utility from receiving the outcome, and (2) it changes the factor by which this extra utility is discounted. In this paper we propose a way to disentangle the two effects, which allows us to draw conclusions about discounting even when baseline consumption changes over time.
Subjects: 
Hyperbolic discounting
Constant discounting
Preference reversals
Decreasing impatience
JEL: 
D91
D81
D11
Document Type: 
Conference Paper

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