1 Department of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, Zhejiang University.
2 Center for Adaptive Rationality, Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany.
Psychol Sci. 2019 Aug;30(8):1218-1233. doi: 10.1177/0956797619858969. Epub 2019 Jul 18.
Uncertainty about the waiting time before obtaining an outcome is integral to intertemporal choice. Here, we showed that people express different time preferences depending on how they learn about this temporal uncertainty. In two studies, people chose between pairs of options: one with a single, sure delay and the other involving multiple, probabilistic delays (a lottery). The probability of each delay occurring either was explicitly described () or could be learned through experiential sampling (; the delay itself was not experienced). When the shorter delay was rare, people preferred the lottery more often when it was described than when it was experienced. When the longer delay was rare, this pattern was reversed. Modeling analyses suggested that underexperiencing rare delays and different patterns of probability weighting contribute to this description-experience gap. Our results challenge traditional models of intertemporal choice with temporal uncertainty as well as the generality of inverse-S-shaped probability weighting in such choice.
在跨期选择中，对获得结果之前的等待时间的不确定性是其不可或缺的组成部分。在这里，我们表明，人们根据他们了解这种时间不确定性的方式表现出不同的时间偏好。在两项研究中，人们在一对选项之间进行选择：一个是单一的、确定的延迟，另一个是涉及多个、概率性的延迟（彩票）。每种延迟发生的概率要么被明确描述（），要么可以通过经验抽样来学习（；延迟本身并没有被经历过）。当较短的延迟很少发生时，当延迟被描述时，人们更倾向于选择彩票，而不是当他们体验到延迟时。当较长的延迟很少发生时，这种模式就会反转。建模分析表明，对稀有延迟的体验不足和不同的概率加权模式导致了这种描述-体验的差距。我们的结果对具有时间不确定性的跨期选择的传统模型以及此类选择中反 S 形概率加权的普遍性提出了挑战。
