OUTCOME- AND SIGN-DEPENDENT TIME PREFERENCES: AN INCENTIVIZED INTERTEMPORAL CHOICE EXPERIMENT INVOLVING EFFORT AND MONEY

Shohei Yamamoto, Shotaro Shiba and Nobuyuki Hanaki

ISER Discussion Paper from Institute of Social and Economic Research, The University of Osaka

Abstract: Previous research consistently identified differences in time preferences between effort and monetary decisions. However, the root cause of this difference—whether it stemmed from the intrinsic nature of the outcomes or the associated pleasurable or unpleasurable experiences— remained undefined. In response, we conducted novel two-stage experiments employing a 2 × 2 design contrasting outcomes (money and effort) and domains (gain and loss). This approach allowed for the incentivization of all decisions, including those involving future monetary losses. Our study reveals that present bias is absent at the median for both monetary and effort-based choices, whereas the size of individual deviations from time-consistent choice, in either direction, is significantly larger for effort, indicating outcome-dependent preferences. Effort choices are also smoother than monetary choices and far more heterogeneous across individuals in their time preferences.

Date: 2024-02, Revised 2026-10
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.iser.osaka-u.ac.jp/static/resources/docs/dp/DP1230RR.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:dpr:wpaper:1230rr

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in ISER Discussion Paper from Institute of Social and Economic Research, The University of Osaka Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Librarian ().