Center for Behavioral Decision Research

CBDR : Seminar Series : Seminar by Gal Zauberman

It’s about Time: Cognitive Processes in Intertemporal Choice

	presented by Gal Zauberman (The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania )


	Thursday, January 15	link to paper
	12pm
	Porter 223D	link to Speaker's Site

	Abstract:

	There has been a great deal of research on how people trade off costs and benefits that occur at different points in time. The current work looks at the psychological mechanisms affecting how individuals form preferences for outcomes in the near versus more distant future. Whereas much of the work on intertemporal choice attributes extreme discounting and present-biased preferences to the emotionality of immediate outcomes, my work shows that many of the classic findings in the literature can be explained by purely ‘cold’ cognitive mechanisms. I will present two classes of cognitive processes, the first having to do with differential representation of near and more distant events and the second having to do with the psychophysics of time. In particular, I will present work that examines the role varying levels of concreteness in representation and processing mode; as well as the role of time perception itself.

	Host at CMU: Morewedge