The Received Wisdom

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Abstract

This chapter introduces the reader to future discounting and some received wisdom. The received wisdom about rational planning tends to assume that it is irrational to have near‐biased preferences (i.e., preferences for lesser goods now compared to greater goods further in the future).Thechapter describes these preferences by introducing the reader to value functions. Value functions are then used to model different kinds of distant future temporal discounting (e.g., hyperbolic, exponential, absolute). Finally, the chapter makes a distinction between temporal discounting and risk discounting. It offers a reverse lottery test to tease apart these two kinds of discounting.