Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Impatience and grades: Delay-discount rates correlate negatively with college GPA Although we professors may not care to admit it, for many college students most of the rewards of academic success are rather remote in time. The rewards of studying for an exam may be days or weeks away. The career-related rewards of earning a good grade point average (GPA) may be years away. It is perhaps common sense that students who are more future-oriented should perform better in college than those who are less so. In this paper we test this prediction by examining the relationship between the rate at which a person discounts future monetary rewards and college academic performance as measured by GPA. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor mayDelay-discounting refers to the reduction in the present value of a future reward as the delay to that reward is increased. The discount rate determines the steepness of this reduction in value with delay, such that the larger the rate, the more the person discounts the future, and the less value future rewards (or costs) should have in current decisions. A person with a discount rate of zero would not be sensitive to delay, and would value future and immediate rewards equally. A person with a high discount rate would place little value on future rewards. According to the delay-discounting model of impulsiveness (Ainslie, 1975;1992;Rachlin & Green, 1972), as the discount rate increases, people should also become more susceptible to making impulsive decisions (c.f., Strotz, 1956;Winston & Woodbury, 1991). Thus, this model predicts that college students with higher discount rates should tend to place less weight on the future in current decisions, and should be more impulsive than those with lower rates. Consequently, we predict that discount rates and college GPA should be negatively correlated.To examine the relationship between GPA and discount rates, we obtained college GPA and SAT scores for students at two liberal arts colleges for whom discount rates had been estimated in previous studies (Kirby, 1997;1998;Kirby & Santiesteban, 2002 This phenomenon can be modeled using hyperbolic discount functions, which typically provide a better fit to empirical data than do exponential functions in which the discount rate itself is insensitive to delay. One hyperbolic function, which has been shown to fit animal and human discounting data quite well, is the following (Mazur, 1987):where V is the present value of a reward of amount A that i...

Research has consistently found that the decline in the present values of delayed rewards as delay increases is better fit by hyperbolic than by exponential delay-discounting functions. However, concave utility, transaction costs, and risk each could produce hyperbolic-looking data, even when the underlying discounting function is exponential. In Experiments 1 (N = 45) and 2 (N = 103), participants placed bids indicating their present values of real future monetary rewards in computer-based 2nd-price auctions. Both experiments suggest that utility is not sufficiently concave to account for the superior fit of hyperbolic functions. Experiment 2 provided no evidence that the effects of transaction costs and risk are large enough to account for the superior fit of hyperbolic functions.

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