Economists and psychologists have devised numerous instruments to measure time preferences and have generated a rich literature examining the extent to which time preferences predict important outcomes; however, we still do not know which measures work best. With the help of a large sample of...

This paper studies the relevance of cognitive uncertainty - subjective uncertainty over one’s utility-maximizing action - for understanding and predicting intertemporal choice. The main idea is that when people are cognitively noisy, such as when a decision is complex, they implicitly treat...

This paper studies the relevance of cognitive uncertainty - subjective uncertainty over one's utility-maximizing action - for understanding and predicting intertemporal choice. The main idea is that when people are cognitively noisy, such as when a decision is complex, they implicitly treat...

Standard consumption utility is linked in time to a consumption event, whereas the timing of prosocial utility flows is ambiguous. Prosocial utility may depend on the actual utility consequences for others - it is consequence-dated - or it may be related to the act of giving and is thus...

We provide experimental evidence that core intertemporal choice anomalies - including extreme short-run impatience, structural estimates of present bias, hyperbolicity and transitivity violations - are driven by complexity rather than time or risk preferences. First, all anomalies also arise in...

We provide experimental evidence that core intertemporal choice anomalies -- including extreme short-run impatience, structural estimates of present bias, hyperbolicity and transitivity violations -- are driven by complexity rather than time or risk preferences. First, all anomalies also arise...

A large literature shows that people discount financial rewards hyperbolically instead of exponentially. While discounting of money has been questioned as a measure of time preferences, it continues to be highly relevant in empirical practice and predicts a wide range of real-world behaviors,...