<p> People make many decisions with consequences that are delayed, rather than immediate. Of particular interest are decisions in which long-term gains must be balanced against short-term costs. Such time trade-offs can be advantageous or deleterious to the decision-maker: the decision to abstain from immediately entering the labor force and instead pursuing a lengthy education benefits the educated in the long-term although their short-term wages are lowered. In contrast, the decision to overeat increases the short-term enjoyment of food but decreases long-term health. A large body of research in psychology has shown that the ability to delay gratification and elect long-term over short-term gains leads to superior life outcomes. </p><p> Expanding on this tradition, my thesis examines time-tradeoffs in two domains: first, I examine the resolution of time-tradeoffs in settings in which people are asked to explicitly decide between short-term and long-term gains. This line of work is closely connected to economic models of decision-making that account for the role of time in shaping decisions. I then transition to examining the resolution of time-tradeoffs in settings in which time trade-offs are implicit. Specifically, I examine the way in which people explore unfamiliar environments in order to maximize information. Maximizing information represents a time-tradeoff because the goal of obtaining information generally requires the decision-maker to eschew known sources of short-term rewards in order to explore new options whose benefits will be reaped only in the long-term. </p><p> Collectively, I describe a large body of experiments that examine these two classes of decision-making and put forward two new models of decision-making, the ITCH model of intertemporal choice and the MaxInfo model of exploratory decision-making, that account for the data from these experiments and extend the state of the art.</p>
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PROQUEST/oai:pqdtoai.proquest.com:3562231 |
| Date | 03 July 2013 |
| Creators | White, John Myles |
| Publisher | Princeton University |
| Source Sets | ProQuest.com |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | thesis |
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