Eliciting Individual-Specific Discount Rates

Trudy Ann Cameron () and Geoffrey Richard Gerdes ()

University of Oregon Economics Department Working Papers from University of Oregon Economics Department

Abstract: Longstanding debate over the appropriate social discount rate for public projects stems from our lack of knowledge about how individual discount rates vary across people and across choice contexts. Using a sample of roughly 15,000 choices by over 2000 individuals, we estimate utility theoretic models concerning private tradeoffs involving money over time that reveal individual specific discount rates. We control for experimentally differentiated choice scenarios, sociodemographic heterogeneity, and elicitation formats, and complex forms of heteroscedasticity. Statistically significant heterogeneity in discount rates is quantified for both an exponential discounting model and a competing hyperbolic model, but neither specification clearly dominates.

JEL-codes: D91 H4 C25 C35 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cdm
Date: 2003-01-01
View list of references

Downloads: (external link)
http://economics.uor ... _Gerdes_discount.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in University of Oregon Economics Department Working Papers from University of Oregon Economics Department
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Bill Harbaugh ().