More than Money Over Time: Consumers’ Intertemporal Preferences for Money, Health and Getting Things Done

Intertemporal preferences have become an increasingly important construct for explaining consumer behavior. Most measures have focused on tradeoffs between smaller monetary amounts that are available sooner and larger later monetary amounts. But consumers make tradeoffs in many other domains, too, like health and work. We developed a new approach, the Intertemporal Preferences in Consumer Behavior (IPICB) scale, which uses semantic, self-report items derived from crowdsourcing and previous research. The IPICB measures preferences in three domains: Health: maintaining a healthy lifestyle; Consumer Finance: saving, spending wisely, and investment; and Effort: a preference for getting things done rather sooner than later. We find domain-specific predictive validity for a large variety of behaviors (e.g., Credit scores, intentions to get vaccinated, filing tax returns on time), and the IPICB explains additional variance beyond more standardly elicited intertemporal preferences, even when examined along with measures relating to self-control and other covariates (numeracy, social desirability and parents’ SES). The IPICB’s accessible verbal format allows widespread application for studying consumers’ intertemporal preferences.