The Agent's Impatience: A Self–Other Decision Model of Intertemporal Choices
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Intertemporal choices represent one of the most prevalent and fundamental trade-offs in consumer decision making. While prior research on intertemporal choices has focused on choices for oneself, intertemporal choices often involve one individual choosing on behalf of another. How do intertemporal choices made for another person differ from otherwise identical choices made for oneself? This research introduces a self–other decision model that distinguishes reaction utility (derived from interpersonal feedback) from vicarious utility (derived from imagining the recipient's experience). The authors tested model-derived hypotheses in 13 experiments (N = 4,799) involving decisions between peers. Consistent with the proposed role of reaction utility in the model, they find that intertemporal choices made for others are typically more “impatient” than choices for oneself. Moreover, this “agent's impatience” is attenuated when contextual and individual differences weaken the anticipation of interpersonal feedback. Together, the theoretical model and experimental results highlight the rewarding value of interpersonal feedback in self–other decision making, shedding new light on interpersonal consumer choices.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.125 | 0.041 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".