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Updated: Aug 4, 2025

The Joint Effect of Social Comparison and Social Distance on Evaluation of Intertemporal Choice Outcomes in Event-related Potential Studies
Published on: August 25, 2023
Information acquisition and decision strategies in intertemporal choice
Lisheng He1, Daniel Wall2, Crystal Reeck3
1SILC Business School, Shanghai University, China.
Abstract:
Intertemporal decision models describe choices between outcomes with different delays. While these models mainly focus on predicting choices, they make implicit assumptions about how people acquire and process information. A link between information processing and choice model predictions is necessary for a complete mechanistic account of decision making. We establish this link by fitting 18 intertemporal choice models to experimental datasets with both choice and information acquisition data. First, we show that choice models have highly correlated fits: people that behave according to one model also behave according to other models that make similar information processing assumptions. Second, we develop and fit an attention model to information acquisition data. Critically, the attention model parameters predict which type of intertemporal choice models best describes a participant's choices. Overall, our results relate attentional processes to models of intertemporal choice, providing a stepping stone towards a complete mechanistic account of intertemporal decision making.
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