Thursday, August 30, 2012

Present Bias

From Planet Money
          Given a choice between $50 now and $100 in a month, many people would take the money
           now. But offered $50 in a year, or $100 in 13 months, they'd wait the extra month to double
           their money.

 Another example from This Wikipedia page
In the experiment, subjects of the study were offered free rentals of movies which were classified into two categories - "lowbrow" (e.g. The Breakfast Club) and "highbrow" (e.g. Schindler's List) - and researchers analyzed patterns of choices made. In the absence of dynamic inconsistency, the choice would be expected to be the same regardless of the delay between the decision date and the consumption date. In practice, however, the outcome was different. When subjects had to choose a movie to watch immediately, the choice was consistently lowbrow for the majority of the subjects. But when they were asked to pick a movie to be watched at later date, highbrow movies were chosen far more often. Among movies picked four or more days in advance, over 70% were highbrow.[3]

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