Complexity and time
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: A large literature shows that people’s valuation of delayed financial rewards violates exponential discounting, exhibiting a hyperbolic pattern: high short-run impatience that strongly decreases in the length of the delay. We test the hypothesis that the hyperbolic pattern in measured discount rates over money reflects mistakes driven by the complexity of evaluating delayed payoffs. We document that hyperbolicity (i) is strongly associated with choice inconsistency and cognitive uncertainty, (ii) increases in overt complexity manipulations, and (iii) arises nearly identically in computationally similar tasks that involve no actual payoff delays. Our results suggest that even if people had exponential discount functions, complexity-driven mistakes would cause them to make hyperbolic choices. We examine which experimental techniques to estimate present bias are (not) confounded by information-processing constraints.
DOI: 10.5167/uzh-292606
Authors: Enke, Benjamin, Graeber, Thomas, Oprea, Ryan
Language: English
Subfield: General Decision Sciences
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7131662756
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