Rationalizing Decision-Making: Understanding the Cost and Perception of Time
Keywords:
intertemporal decision-making, time, time perception, temporal discounting, subjective value, impulsivity, Optimal Foraging Theory, Ecological Rationality Theory, hyperbolic discounting, Discounted Utility Theory, Scalar Expectancy TheoryAbstract
Humans, as with other animals, decide between courses of action based on the evaluation of the relative worth of expected outcomes. How outcome magnitude interacts with temporal delay, however, has yet eluded a principled understanding that reconciles the breadth of well-established behaviors in intertemporal decision-making. Here, we review the history of this endeavor to rationalize decision-making regarding the domain of time, highlighting extant theories, their limitations, and recent experimental and theoretical advances. These new advances recast long presumed deficiencies in observed decision-making behavior, not as flaws, but rather as signs of optimal decision-making under experiential constraints. This new conception naturally unites the fields of intertemporal decision-making and time perception, which have long been recognized to be interconnected but not yet unified in a formal framework.
Issue
Section
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0)) that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (see The Effect of Open Access).