Models and Methods in Delay Discounting

摘要

Delay discounting (DD) is a term typically used to describe the devaluation of rewards over time,and much research across a wide variety of domains has illustrated that people in general prefera smaller reward delivered soon as opposed to a larger reward delivered at a later stage. Despitenumerous attempts, a single unified model of DD that accounts for the varied pattern of resultstypically observed has been elusive. One of the difficulties in deriving a unified model is thepresence of many framing and context effects, situations in which changing, apparently irrelevant,aspects of the choice scenarios lead to different selections. Additionally, different paradigms of DDresearch use quite different methodology, which poses challenges for a unified model. This chapterdescribes some of the difficulties in creating a single DD model and suggests some experimentsthat would help integrate different paradigms to create a clearer picture of DD.