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Measuring Impatience in Intertemporal Choice

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  • Salvador Cruz Rambaud
  • María José Muñoz Torrecillas

Abstract

In general terms, decreasing impatience means decreasing discount rates. This property has been usually referred to as hyperbolic discounting, although there are other discount functions which also exhibit decreasing discount rates. This paper focuses on the measurement of the impatience associated with a discount function with the aim of establishing a methodology to compare this characteristic for two different discount functions. In this way, first we define the patience associated with a discount function in an interval as its corresponding discount factor and consequently we deduce that the impatience at a given moment is the corresponding instantaneous discount rate. Second we compare the degree of impatience of discount functions belonging to the same or different families, by considering the cases in which the functions do or do not intersect.

Suggested Citation

  • Salvador Cruz Rambaud & María José Muñoz Torrecillas, 2016. "Measuring Impatience in Intertemporal Choice," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(2), pages 1-17, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0149256
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0149256
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Cited by:

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    2. António Afonso & Eduardo de Sá Fortes Leitão Rodrigues, 2023. "Consumption Patterns of Indebted Households: Unravelling the Relevance of Fiscal Policy," CESifo Working Paper Series 10565, CESifo.
    3. Salvador Cruz Rambaud & Blas Torrecillas Jover, 2020. "An Extension of the Concept of Derivative: Its Application to Intertemporal Choice," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 8(5), pages 1-14, May.
    4. Atin Basuchoudhary & Andreas Freytag, 2020. "The Political Economy of Reconciliation: A Theoretical Primer," CESifo Working Paper Series 8400, CESifo.
    5. Cruz Rambaud, Salvador & Parra Oller, Isabel María & Valls Martínez, María del Carmen, 2018. "The amount-based deformation of the q-exponential discount function: A joint analysis of delay and magnitude effects," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 508(C), pages 788-796.
    6. Salvador Cruz Rambaud & Piedad Ortiz Fernández, 2020. "Delay Effect and Subadditivity. Proposal of a New Discount Function: The Asymmetric Exponential Discounting," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 8(3), pages 1-14, March.
    7. Salvador Cruz Rambaud & Isabel González Fernández & Viviana Ventre, 2018. "Modeling the inconsistency in intertemporal choice: the generalized Weibull discount function and its extension," Annals of Finance, Springer, vol. 14(3), pages 415-426, August.
    8. Salvador Cruz Rambaud & Isabel González Fernández, 2019. "A measure of inconsistencies in intertemporal choice," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(10), pages 1-24, October.

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