The instability of risk preferences: time versus money, sexual motivation, hunger.

Nowadays time is the scarce resource for many consumers. Economists never deal with ‘time poverty’ explicitly since they typically equate time to its monetary equivalent. Individual consumers do not always seem to make their time-related decisions in the same way as their monetary decisions, however. In my PhD project I would like to shed more light on how consumers allocate their scarce resource ‘time’. More specifically, I will investigate whether consumers’ time-related decisions can be described and predicted by prospect theory’s value function. This value function is characterized by three essential features, namely: 1) Referencedependence: the value function is defined over gains and losses relative to a certain reference point. 2) Both the gain and loss functions display diminishing sensitivity (i.e. the value function is S-shaped). 3) Loss aversion (i.e. losses loom larger than gains). By using procedures that have been established in the domain of monetary decision making, I will investigate whether consumers also value their time according to these three characteristics. In doing so, I will explore important boundary conditions to the generalizability of the value function to the time domain.status: publishe