Replication Data for: Measuring Time Preferences in Large Surveys

Time preferences may explain public opinion about a wide range of long-term pol- icy problems with costs and benefits realized in the distant future. However, mass publics may discount these costs and benefits because they are later or because they are more uncertain. Standard methods to elicit individual-level time preferences tend to conflate risk and time attitudes and are susceptible to social desirability bias. A potential solution relies on a costly lab-experimental method, convex time budgets (CTB). We present and experimentally validate an affordable version of this approach for implementation in mass surveys. We find that the theoretically preferred CTB patience measure predicts attitudes toward a local, delayed investment problem but fails to predict support for more complex, future-oriented policies.

时间偏好（time preferences）可用于解释公众对诸多长期政策议题的态度——此类议题的成本与收益均需在遥远的未来才会显现。不过，普通民众可能会对这类成本与收益进行贴现：要么因其发生时点偏晚，要么因其不确定性更高。当前用于获取个体层面时间偏好的标准方法，往往会混淆风险态度与时间态度，且易受社会期许偏差（social desirability bias）的干扰。一种潜在的解决方案依托于一项成本较高的实验室实验方法——凸性时间预算（convex time budgets, CTB）。本文提出并通过实验验证了该方法的低成本适配版本，使其可应用于大规模社会调查。研究结果显示，理论上更优的CTB耐心度量指标能够预测本地延迟投资议题的公众态度，但无法预测公众对更为复杂的未来导向型政策的支持意愿。