A Direct Method for the Estimation of Temporal Preferences

Politics are rife with intertemporal tradeoffs. Yet, current methods to estimate voters’ temporal preferences suffer important limitations: on the one hand, methods that require few survey items fail to estimate important parameters (such as smoothing); on the other hand, methods that do estimate these require a long series of questions with minor—yet methodological essential–variations.

This project introduces a new method that only requires a handful of questions to estimate individual-level temporal preferences and compares it to the Convex Time Budget (CTB) approach developed by Andreoni and Sprenger (2012) which commonly requires a dozen or more items.