Abstract
Study objective: "Time preference" and "temporal discounting" refer to a decrease in the subjective value of a reward as the delay to its receipt increases. Economics and psychology have attempted to explain this phefnomenon from different viewpoints and with different methods. In economics, early researchers on time preference proposed exponential functions to show rational allocations of consumption between the present and the future. However, recent research on time preference has reported anomalies that cannot be described by exponential functions, and so new discounting models have been proposed that can describe these anomalies. In psychology, animal and human temporal discounting are considered to be described better by hyperbolic functions than by exponential ones. Economic variables correlating to the discounting rate have been reported. Economic researchers have to measure discounting rate in real-choice situations. It is expected that, in both economics and psychology, temporal discounting research will be integrated into an interdisciplinary research area that brings further understanding of this phenomenon.
