Ex ante, my primary concerns were about implementation across the wide expanse of federal applications, supporting the supplemental use of distributional weighting, trying to find a supportable middle ground on discounting using the expected value of bounds and a more consistent scope of analysis. Ex post, I felt heard if not followed, perhaps not uncommon for reviewers.

This paper compares behavior under four different implementations of infinitely repeated games in the laboratory: the standard random termination method [proposed by Roth and Murnighan (J Math Psychol 17:189–198, 1978)] and three other methods that de-couple the expected number of rounds and the discount factor. Two of these methods involve a fixed number of repetitions with payoff discounting, followed by random termination [proposed by Sabater-Grande and Georgantzis (J Econ Behav Organ 48:37–50, 2002)] or followed by a coordination game [proposed in (Andersson and Wengström in J Econ Behav Organ 81:207–219, 2012; Cooper and Kuhn in Am Econ J Microecon 6:247–278, 2014a)]. We also propose a new method—block random termination—in which subjects receive feedback about termination in blocks of rounds. We find that behavior is consistent with the presence of dynamic incentives only with methods using random termination, with the standard method generating the highest level of cooperation. Subject behavior in the other two methods display two features: a higher level of stability in cooperation rates and less dependence on past experience. Estimates of the strategies used by subjects reveal that across implementations, even when the discount rate is the same, if interactions are expected to be longer defection increases and the use of the Grim strategy decreases.

We evaluate data on choices made from convex time budgets (CTB) in Andreoni and Sprenger (Am Econ Rev 102(7):3333–3356, 2012a) and Augenblick et al. (Q J Econ 130(3):1067–1115, 2015), two influential studies that proposed and applied this experimental technique. We use the weak axiom of revealed preference (WARP) to test for external consistency relative to pairwise choice, and demand, wealth and impatience monotonicity to test for internal consistency. We find that choices made by subjects in the original Andreoni and Sprenger (Am Econ Rev 102(7):3333–3356, 2012a) paper violate WARP frequently; violations of all three internal measures of monotonicity are concentrated in subjects who take advantage of the novel feature of CTB by making interior choices. Wealth monotonicity violations are more prevalent and pronounced than either demand or impatience monotonicity violations. We substantiate the importance of our desiderata of choice consistency in examining effort allocation choices made in Augenblick et al. (Q J Econ 130(3):1067–1115, 2015), where we find considerably more demand monotonicity violations, as well as many classical monotonicity violations which are associated with time inconsistent behavior. We believe that the frequency and magnitude of WARP and monotonicity violations found in the two studies pose important confounds for interpreting and structurally estimating choice patterns elicited through CTB. We encourage researchers employing CTB in present and future experiments to include consistency tests in their design and pre-estimation analysis.

In this paper, we present a standardized approach for using cancer incidence and survival data to account for the timing between a reduction in carcinogen exposure and the subsequent reduction in cancer risk and fatality. While the estimates for this timing between a reduction in carcinogen exposure and reduced cancer risk would ideally come from high-quality studies specifically examining this question, very few such studies are available. Thus, we designed an approach to account for this timing when sufficient data are not available elsewhere. Our approach can be used in estimating monetized values for achieving small reductions in the risks for many common specific types of cancer in benefit–cost analyses of regulatory and non-regulatory policies in the United States that achieve cancer risk reductions by reducing carcinogen exposures. We provide estimated values for 108 different cancer sites and for all cancer sites combined. We accompany this paper with a spreadsheet-based tool that presents our results separately for non-fatal and fatal risks so that results can easily be calculated using different combinations of discount rates, latency between carcinogen exposure and cancer diagnosis, values for the willingness-to-pay to avoid fatal and non-fatal cancer risks, and potentially affected populations.

This paper examines the impact of different ways of inducing discounting in alternating-offer bargaining games in the lab. We examine this by following the framework of Ochs and Roth (Am Econ Rev, pp. 355–384, 1989) and test whether the model's predictions find support in data under three different discounting implementations; the shrinking-pie procedure, the effective-discounting procedure and the bargaining-delay procedure. We find no sensitivity to the number of periods in any of the three procedures. However, we find mixed evidence for the effect of changing the discount factor in the effective-discounting procedure and the shrinking-pie procedure, but the magnitude of effects are small. Furthermore, there was more disagreement in both the effective-discounting and bargaining-delay procedures than in the shrinking-pie procedure.

The social cost of greenhouse gases is important in many regulatory impact analyses. However, calculations of the social cost of greenhouse gases are highly complex and periodically revisited. We offer seven recommendations to improve current estimates. These include recommendations to use both country-level and global measures of the social cost of greenhouse gases, to use country-specific values for monetizing climate damages, to represent uncertainties by reporting distributions instead of using only central values, and to conduct a temporal distributional analysis that shows the magnitudes of climate damages across generations. We also provide recommendations for the discount rates that should be used when estimating the social cost of greenhouse gases, and the appropriate discount rates for regulatory impact analyses that include the social cost of greenhouse gases.

Time preferences may explain public opinion about a wide range of long-term policy problems with costs and benefits realized in the distant future. However, mass publics may discount these costs and benefits because they are later or because they are more uncertain. Standard methods to elicit individual-level time preferences tend to conflate risk and time attitudes and are susceptible to social desirability bias. A potential solution relies on a costly lab-experimental method, convex time budgets (CTB). We present and experimentally validate an affordable version of this approach for implementation in mass surveys. We find that the theoretically preferred CTB patience measure predicts attitudes toward a local, delayed investment problem but fails to predict support for more complex, future-oriented policies.

The objective of this paper is to measure and compare the subjective time discounting of professional athletes and non-athletes. By using a questionnaire, we found higher subjective discounting for professional athletes than for non-athletes. We also found that the professional athletes’ win-orientation positively affected their present preferences. On the other hand, professional athletes’ play- orientation, which reflects their attitude towards the game itself, negatively affected their present preferences. No such effects were found in non-athletes. We argue that the “win-at-all-costs” competitive approach that leads athletes to sacrifice everything in order to win may cause (or reflect) their higher preference for the present.

In two studies, time preferences for financial gains and losses at delays of up to 50 years were elicited using three different methods: matching, fixed-sequence choice titration, and a dynamic “staircase” choice method. Matching was found to create fewer demand characteristics and to produce better fits with the hyperbolic model of discounting. The choice-based measures better predicted real-world outcomes such as smoking and payment of credit card debt. No consistent advantages were found for the dynamic staircase method over fixed-sequence titration.

To study intertemporal choices, researchers typically instruct subjects to choose between smaller and sooner (SS) and larger and later (LL) rewards (e.g., gaining CNY 210 in a week vs. gaining CNY 250 in five weeks). People generally tend to discount steeply and prefer SS to LL rewards in such situations. Jiang, Hu and Zhu (2014) recently showed that adding upfront losses or gains to both SS and LL rewards can reduce people’s discounting, and they provided several possible accounts for this effect, including the salience account and the time scale hypothesis. In the current paper, based on the upfront money effect found in Jiang et al. (2014), we further showed that the effect of discounting decreasing could be extended to adding dated-money between SS and LL rewards and after LL rewards. The results helped us exclude both the time scale hypothesis and another possible explanation: preference for improvement. We hypothesized that all the current findings (recorded in this paper and in Jiang et al.) could be accommodated well using the salience account.

The goal of natural resource damage assessment (NRDA) is to compensate the public for losses to natural resources from past or ongoing hazardous releases, including losses that may persist into the future. Compensation is delivered in the form of restoration projects. Resolving NRDA liability requires balancing losses and restoration benefits over multiple decades and converting them into a present value for calculating appropriate damages. For the past two decades, NRDA practitioners have used a real discount rate of 3 % to convert losses and benefits to a present value equivalent. That rate was based, in part, on real historical yields on risk-free debt (e.g., the real rate of return on 3-month Treasury bills). Declining interest rates on risk-free debt in recent years has led to suggestions to reexamine the historical consensus discount rate. This paper reviews two alternative conceptual paradigms for selecting a discount rate in NRDA cases: the social rate of time preference and discount rates for tort cases. We summarize historical data for empirically implementing the two paradigms and discuss the ramifications of the different options. Based on our review, we suggest maintaining the 3 % consensus as a practical solution to a range of empirical candidates within the two conceptual paradigms.

Uncertain future risks pose cognitive and analytical challenges to household decision makers. Risks with uncertain probabilities, coupled with potentially severe outcomes pose problems for decision-making and are prone to overreactions. Imprecision in risk estimates generates behavioral distortions such as ambiguity aversion. This article presents new empirical results indicating household overvaluations of uncertain threats posed by several drinking water risks: traces of prescription drugs in drinking water, plastic water bottles with bisphenol-A, and the weed killer atrazine in drinking water. Negative reactions reflect responses to ambiguous risks, but policies driven by these concerns may misallocate regulatory resources due to risk conservatism and “no-regrets” responses.