A theory of anticipated surprise for understanding risky intertemporal choices

Ho Ka Chan and Taro Toyoizumi

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: People often deviate from expected utility theory when making risky and intertemporal choices. While the effects of probabilistic risk and time delay have been extensively studied in isolation, their interplay and underlying theoretical basis are still under debate. In this work, we applied our previously proposed anticipated surprise framework to intertemporal choices with and without explicit probabilistic risk, assuming that delayed reward may fail to materialize at a fixed hazard rate. The model prediction is consistent with key empirical findings: time inconsistency and aversion to timing risk stem from the avoidance of large negative surprises, while differences in mental representations of outcome resolution explain the conflicting effects of probabilistic risk on temporal discounting. This framework is applicable to a broad range of decision-making problems and offers a new perspective over how various types of risk may interact.

Date: 2025-03, Revised 2025-03
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://arxiv.org/pdf/2503.19514 Latest version (application/pdf)

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

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:arx:papers:2503.19514

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers from arXiv.org
Bibliographic data for series maintained by arXiv administrators ().