Hierarchical Bayesian modeling of intertemporal choice
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2017, Vol 12, Issue 1
Abstract
There is a growing interest in studying individual differences in choices that involve trading off reward amount and delay to delivery because such choices have been linked to involvement in risky behaviors, such as substance abuse. The most ubiquitous proposal in psychology is to model these choices assuming delayed rewards lose value following a hyperbolic function, which has one free parameter, named discounting rate. Consequently, a fundamental issue is the estimation of this parameter. The traditional approach estimates each individual’s discounting rate separately, which discards individual differences during modeling and ignores the statistical structure of the population. The present work adopted a different approximation to parameter estimation: each individual’s discounting rate is estimated considering the information provided by all subjects, using state-of-the-art Bayesian inference techniques. Our goal was to evaluate whether individual discounting rates come from one or more subpopulations, using Mazur’s (1987) hyperbolic function. Twelve hundred eighty-four subjects answered the Intertemporal Choice Task developed by Kirby, Petry and Bickel (1999). The modeling techniques employed permitted the identification of subjects who produced random, careless responses, and who were discarded from further analysis. Results showed that one-mixture hierarchical distribution that uses the information provided by all subjects suffices to model individual differences in delay discounting, suggesting psychological variability resides along a continuum rather than in discrete clusters. This different approach to parameter estimation has the potential to contribute to the understanding and prediction of decision making in various real-world situations where immediacy is constantly in conflict with magnitude.
Authors and Affiliations
Melisa E. Chávez, Elena Villalobos, José L. Baroja and Arturo Bouzas
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP678274
- DOI -
- Views 148
- Downloads 0
Maximizing as a predictor of job satisfaction and performance: A tale of three scales
Research on individual differences in maximizing (versus satisficing) has recently proliferated in the Judgment and Decision Making literature, and high scores on this construct have been linked to lower life satisfactio...
Coherence and correspondence in the psychological analysis of numerical predictions: How error-prone heuristics are replaced by ecologically valid heuristics
Numerical predictions are of central interest for both coherence-based approaches to judgment and decisions — the Heuristic and Biases (HB) program in particular — and to correspondence-based approaches — Social Judgment...
How the public, and scientists, perceive advancement of knowledge from conflicting study results
Science often advances through disagreement among scientists and the studies they produce. For members of the public, however, conflicting results from scientific studies may trigger a sense of uncertainty that in turn l...
It must be awful for them: Perspective and task context affects ratings for health conditions.
When survey respondents rate the quality of life (QoL) associated with a health condition, they must not only evaluate the health condition itself, but must also interpret the meaning of the rating scale in order to assi...
The environment matters: Comparing individuals and dyads in their adaptive use of decision strategies
Individuals have been shown to adaptively select decision strategies depending on the environment structure. Two experiments extended this research to the group level. Subjects (N = 240) worked either individually or in...