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Several experiments support this conclusion. Consumers deferring income (from lotteries or investments) for a fixed amount of time were asked to state the amount of money that must be received in the future to render deferring the income worthwhile. Consumers demanded reliably greater future dollar amounts when deferral intervals were described by amounts of time than by dates. Conceptually similar results were obtained when consumers specified deferral intervals instead of dollar amounts. Consumers were not willing to defer income for as long a period when they were asked to specify the amount of time for which they would wait compared with when they specified the date until which they would wait.

This pattern also held when consumers could not specify their own terms but rather chose between a smaller, sooner payoff and a larger, later payoff: Consumers were less likely to wait for larger payoffs when the investment terms were described by amounts of time than when they were described by dates. These findings suggest that impatience increases and discount rates are higher when future intervals are discussed in terms of lengths instead of boundaries.

Extent descriptions also heighten discounting for debts. Consumers facing bills and fines were willing to pay reliably more to defer the debts when told the length of the deferral instead of the date on which the deferral expired. A final study suggests why consumers exhibit greater discounting of future gains and losses with extent descriptions. Although objective interval length does not change when interval description is manipulated, perceptions of interval length are affected by description manipulations. Participants facing extent-based intervals reported that the intervals seemed reliably longer than did those facing equivalent date-based intervals.

Thus, across multiple methods of assessing discounting, consumers discounted the future more sharply when time intervals were described with extents than when they were described with dates, perhaps because extents actually increase the perceived distance to future events. These results have implications for consumer decisions involving intertemporal trade-offs (e.g., investment decisions), and these results join years of research showing consumer discount rates to be more malleable and intertemporal choice to be less orderly than early normative models posited. Notably, the current work suggests that even when all objective factors in the decision situation are fixed, discount rates remain sensitive to ostensibly irrelevant nuances.

Biography
Robyn A. LeBoeuf is Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of Florida. She earned her doctoral degree in Psychology from Princeton University in 2002. Her teaching focuses on consumer behavior and decision making, and she has won the Warrington College of Business Teacher-of-the-Year Award. Her research, which has been published in both marketing and psychology journals, focuses on consumer judgment and decision making, with a specific interest in how context, defined broadly, affects preferences and estimates. Among other topics, she has examined the effect of choice descriptions on preferences (e.g., framing effects), the impact of irrelevant anchoring stimuli on estimates, and the impact of consumers’ salient social identities on their choices.

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