Human research methods for studying discounting

Discounting processes have seen a very large growth in interest by the research community in recent decades. In response to this growth in interest, discounting tasks have been iterated upon and modified to specific contexts, resulting in a large diversity of tasks. While most discounting tasks share the goal of obtaining a discounting rate, the specific parameters and choice algorithms among tasks vary widely. In this chapter, we describe some of the more common discounting task types and considerations for specific contexts. We end the chapter by providing some general recommendations on choosing among the task types and making analysis choices.