Testing the Effect of Risk on Intertemporal Choice in the Chinese Cultural Context

ABSTRACT

Previous studies using Western samples have found that introducing uncertainty to an intertemporal choice decreases the degree of discounting future rewards. The authors of this article examined the effect of risk on intertemporal choice using Chinese participants and found that respondents preferred the smaller but sooner (SS) outcome to the larger but later (LL) one in the presence of risk, which indicates that risk increases rather than decreases the degree of discounting future rewards. Thus, variations in response patterns between different cultural groups suggest that culture may play an important role in intertemporal choice and researchers should delve into this topic from an emic rather than an etic perspective.

Keywords:

• cross-cultural difference
• decision making
• intertemporal choice
• risk

Acknowledgments

This research was partially supported by the National Basic Research Program of China (973 Program, No. 2011CBC711000), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 70871110; 71001098), the Special Fund for Beijing Key Discipline Construction, the Young Scientist Project of IPCAS (No. Y0CX073S01) and the Special Fund for the CAS Presidential Award Winner (No. 20100123). The authors thank Prof. Bernard Guerin and the anonymous referee for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article. The authors also thank Timothy Conboy for English and editing assistance.

Notes

1. In this article the term “discounting” refers to time discounting, i.e., lowering the value of a temporally extended prospect.