People prefer to receive good outcomes immediately rather than wait, and they must be compensated for waiting. But what influences their decision about how much compensation is required for a given wait? To give a partial answer to this question, we develop the DRIFT model, a heuristic description of how framing influences intertemporal choice. We describe 4 experiments showing the implications of this model. In the experiments, we vary how the difference between a smaller sooner outcome and a larger later outcome is framed-either as total interest earned, as an interest rate, or as total amount earned (the conventional frame in studies of intertemporal choice)-and whether the larger later outcome is described as resulting from the investment of the smaller sooner one. These alternate frames have several effects. First, the investment language increases patience. Second, the explicit provision of the (otherwise implicit) experimental interest rate sharply reduces the magnitude effect. Correspondingly, we find that interest frames increase patience when the rewards are small, but they decrease patience when they are large. Third, the interest-rate frame induces somewhat greater discounting for longer time periods and, thus, reverses the common finding of "hyperbolic" discounting. Thus, many of the "stylized facts" implied by studies involving choices between a smaller sooner and a larger later amount are eliminated or reverse under alternate outcome frames.Keywords: intertemporal choice, delay discounting, framing, choice modelling Any interesting choice involves tradeoffs. For intertemporal choices, the tradeoffs involve time and amount-smaller sooner rewards compared with against larger later rewards. For some, the perfect real world example may be the decision of whether to endure lower (or no) wages during college so as to permit greater earnings later.The dominant method for investigating intertemporal choices in the lab has been to elicit choices between smaller-sooner and larger-later amounts of money (see, e.g., Ainslie & Haendel, 1983;Hardisty & Weber, 2009;Kirby, 1997;Read, 2001;Sayman & Öncüler, 2009;Weber et al., 2007;Zauberman, Kim, Malkoc, & Bettmann, 2009). Most of this research has focused on how discount rates are influenced by differences in the magnitude or timing of those outcomes (e.g., Benzion, Rapoport, & Yagil, 1989;Keren & Roelofsma, 1995;Kirby & Herrnstein, 1995;Scholten & Read, 2006;Thaler, 1981). A second research stream has focused on how these choices correlate with other individual differences, such as smoking behavior (Baker, Johnson, & Bickel, 2003;Chabris, Laibson, Morris, Schuldt, & Taubinsky, 2008) or demographic characteristics (Frederick, 2005). A third focus is on the influence of ephemeral states, such as whether participants have been aroused by viewing women in bikinis ( Van den Bergh, Dewitte, & Warlop, 2008) or by the sight or scent of freshly baked cookies (Li, 2008).The present article falls into a fourth stream of research that examines whether, and how, discounting ...