Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/77508 
Year of Publication: 
2012
Series/Report no.: 
Working Paper No. 96
Publisher: 
University of Zurich, Department of Economics, Zurich
Abstract: 
Almost all important decisions in people's lives entail risky and delayed consequences. Regardless of whether we make choices involving health, wealth, love or education, almost every choice involves costs and benefits that are uncertain and materialize over time. Because risk and delay often arise simultaneously, theories of decision making should be capable of explaining how behavior under risk and over time interacts. There is, in fact, a growing body of evidence indicating important interactions between behaviorally revealed risk tolerance and patience. Risk taking behavior is delay dependent, and time discounting is risk dependent. Here we show that the inherent uncertainty of future events conjointly with people's proneness to weight probabilities nonlinearly generates a unifying framework for explaining time-dependent risk taking, risk-dependent time discounting, preferences for late resolution of uncertainty, and several other puzzling interaction effects between risk and time.
Subjects: 
risk taking
time discounting
probability weighting
decreasing impatience
increasing risk tolerance
preference for late resolution of uncertainty
preference for one-shot resolution of uncertainty
JEL: 
D01
D81
D91
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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