What the Future Holds and When: A Description-Experience Gap in Intertemporal Choice.

Area of Science:

• Behavioral Economics
• Decision Science
• Cognitive Psychology

Background:

• Intertemporal choice involves uncertainty about waiting times for outcomes.
• Understanding how people perceive and react to temporal uncertainty is crucial for economic and psychological models.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate how the method of learning about temporal uncertainty (description vs. experience) influences time preferences.
• To examine the description-experience gap in intertemporal choice under temporal uncertainty.

Main Methods:

• Two studies were conducted involving choices between sure delays and lotteries with probabilistic delays.
• Temporal uncertainty was manipulated through explicit description (timing risk) or experiential sampling (timing uncertainty).
• Modeling analyses were used to understand probability weighting and the description-experience gap.

Main Results:

• Preference for lotteries over sure delays differed based on whether temporal uncertainty was described or experienced.
• When the shorter delay was rare, lotteries were preferred more in the described condition than the experienced condition.
• When the longer delay was rare, the preference pattern reversed, showing a description-experience gap.

Conclusions:

• The way temporal uncertainty is learned significantly impacts intertemporal choices and time preferences.
• Findings suggest that underexperiencing rare delays and distinct probability weighting patterns contribute to the observed description-experience gap.
• Results challenge existing models of intertemporal choice and the universality of inverse-S-shaped probability weighting.