Intertemporal tradeoffs, the conflict between current and future costs and benefits, lie at the core of health decisions. An extensive literature on time discounting has documented the widespread tendency to place a lower value on distant outcomes and to favor benefits in the moment. These...

Consumers' intertemporal preferences have been studied across multiple theoretical and applied areas. This article outlines research showing that the context in which intertemporal preferences are expressed matters, as well as research exploring the mechanisms that account for these effects....

Reducing spending in the present requires the combination of being both motivated to provide for one’s future self (valuing the future) and actively considering long-term implications of one’s choices (awareness of the future). Feeling more connected to the future self—thinking that the...

How does the anticipated connectedness between one’s current and future identity help explain impatience in intertemporal preferences? The less consumers are closely connected psychologically to their future selves, the less willing they will be to forgo immediate benefits in order to ensure...

Research on the role of identity in choice varies widely across fields like psychology, philosophy, consumer behavior, and economics, in both the key questions addressed and the methods of investigation. Although a large literature has established how salient aspects of identity affect attitudes...

We study how people’s own evaluation of choice options influences their estimates of other people’s evaluations when their choices are known. People draw a parallel between themselves and others based on the known choice, and conditionally project their own evaluations of the corresponding...