Measuring Impatience Across Different Domains with the Direct Method

This paper extends on a proposed method of measuring temporal discounting. By using the Direct Method, no information of utility was required to measure the degree of impatience for subjects across different domains. In an experiment, the level of discounting of individuals was tested for money, health and the environment. Subjects were significantly impatient for monetary gains, marginally significantly impatient for health gains and not impatient for environmental gains. These findings should contribute to the use of realistic discount rates for policy making.