Risk attitude in small timesaving decisions

Four experiments are presented that explore situations in which a decision maker has to rely on personal experience in an attempt to minimize delays. Experiment 1 shows that risk-attitude in these timesaving decisions is similar to risk-attitude in money-related decisions from experience: A risky prospect is more attractive than a safer prospect with the same expected value only when it leads to a better outcome most of the time. Experiment 2 highlights a boundary condition: It suggests that a difficulty in ranking the relevant delays moves behavior toward random choice. Experiments 3 and 4 show that when actions must be taken during the delay (thereby helping compare delays), this increases the similarity of timesaving decisions to money-related decisions. In these settings the results reflect an increase in risk aversion with experience. The relationship of the results to the study of non-human time-related decisions, human money-related decisions and human time perception is discussed.