Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794, USA.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2013 Jul;39(4):1274-9. doi: 10.1037/a0031170. Epub 2013 Jan 28.
Delay discounting refers to decision-makers' tendency to value immediately available goods more than identical goods available only after some delay. In violation of standard economic theory, decision-makers frequently exhibit dynamic inconsistency; their preferences change simply due to the passage of time. The standard explanation for this behavior has appealed to the nature of decision-makers' discount functions, specifically positing a hyperbolic discount function. Though this explanation has been largely accepted, there has been surprisingly little work examining whether preference reversals are actually consistent with hyperbolic discounting. The current study holds hyperbolic discounting to the same empirical standard that exponential discounting has been held to and finds that choice behavior is not consistent with hyperbolic discounting. Despite the overwhelming focus placed on hyperbolic discounting, the current findings cast doubt on hyperbolic discounting as an explanation of decision-makers' undesirable preference reversals and as an explanation of delay discounting behavior in general.
延迟折扣是指决策者倾向于立即获得的商品价值高于仅在一定延迟后获得的相同商品。违反标准经济理论，决策者经常表现出动态不一致性；他们的偏好仅仅由于时间的推移而发生变化。对于这种行为的标准解释诉诸于决策者的折扣函数的性质，具体假设了双曲线折扣函数。尽管这一解释已被广泛接受，但几乎没有研究检验偏好反转是否实际上与双曲线折扣一致。本研究将双曲线折扣置于与指数折扣相同的经验标准之下，并发现选择行为与双曲线折扣不一致。尽管人们强烈关注双曲线折扣，但目前的发现使决策者的不良偏好反转的双曲线折扣解释以及一般的延迟折扣行为解释受到了质疑。
