Issues In Supporting Intertemporal Choice

Abstract

Intertemporal decision making refers to contexts in which the consequences accumulate in stages over time. Attention is confined to cases in which the stages are discrete. The purpose of this paper is to highlight some of the anomalies between how people‘ should’ make and how they ‘do’ make intertemporal decisions: i.e. between findings in the normative and descriptive literatures. The paper indicates some of the framing issues which must be considered when trying to obtain a decision maker’s preferences, especially with respect to the way the questions are posed. The intention is to identify some of the bridges which need to be built between descriptive and normative ideas if decision makers are to be supported effectively in making intertemporal decisions.

The concepts and ideas are illustrated in the context of the decisions faced after a nuclear accident to indicate how information should be presented in order to obtain ‘unbiased’ preferences from decision maker - or, at least, to reduce any bias. These issue are currently being faced in the design of RODOS, a decision support system being built to aid emergency management in the event of a nuclear accident with off-site and, hence, probable long term consequences.