Time preferences and consumer behavior

David Bradford; Charles Courtemanche; Garth Heutel; Patrick McAlvanah; Christopher Ruhm

doi:10.1007/s11166-018-9272-8

Time preferences and consumer behavior

David Bradford, Charles Courtemanche, Garth Heutel, Patrick McAlvanah, Christopher Ruhm

Economics

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

58 Scopus citations

Abstract

We investigate the predictive power of survey-elicited time preferences. The discount factor elicited from choice experiments using real payments predicts various health, energy, and financial outcomes, including overall self-reported health, smoking, installing energy-efficient lighting, and credit card balance. Allowing for time-inconsistent preferences, both the long-run and present-bias discount factors (δ and β) are also significantly associated in the expected direction with several outcomes. We consider several hypotheses regarding the strength of the association between discount factors and outcomes, such as salience of the outcome or liquidity constraints.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	119-145
Number of pages	27
Journal	Journal of Risk and Uncertainty
Volume	55
Issue number	2-3
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/s11166-018-9272-8
State	Published - Dec 1 2017

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Acknowledgements We thank Will Mautz and Camden Sweed for valuable research assistance, Georgia State University, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, and the Harvard Center for Risk Analysis for funding, Darren Lubotsky for providing his code to implement the multiple proxies procedure, and Allen Bellas and conference and seminar participants at UNCG, GSU, Georgia Tech, the Federal Trade Commission, the Midwest Economics Association meetings, and the Harvard Center For Risk Analysis’s March 2014 BRisk, Perception, and Response^ conference for helpful comments. Ruhm thanks the University of Virginia Bankard Fund for partial financial support. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the Federal Trade Commission.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2018, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

Keywords

Discounting
Energy
Health
Present bias
Risk and time
Time preferences
Time-inconsistency

ASJC Scopus subject areas

Accounting
Finance
Economics and Econometrics

UN SDGs

This output contributes to the following UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

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10.1007/s11166-018-9272-8

Cite this

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Time preferences and consumer behavior

Abstract

Bibliographical note

Keywords

ASJC Scopus subject areas

UN SDGs

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