Delayed monetary losses: Do different procedures and discounting measures assess the same construct?

Abstract

The present study examined two procedures for assessing the discounting of delayed, hypothetical, monetary losses: the Adjusting-Amount procedure (Estle et al., 2006) and the Delayed Losses Questionnaire (Myerson et al., 2017), which was modeled on Kirby et al.’s (1999) delayed reward Monetary Choice Questionnaire. Of interest was whether these two procedures assess the same underlying construct. Online participants (N = 431) completed both the Adjusting-Amount procedure and the Delayed Losses Questionnaire. Results revealed that regardless of the delayed amount and whether the discounting measure used was atheoretical (area under the curve and immediate-choice proportion) or theoretically based (log k), the discounting on the Adjusting-Amount procedure was highly correlated with the discounting on the Delayed Losses Questionnaire (all r > .72). In addition, most of the participants (72.2 %) who showed one type of discounting pattern on one procedure (e.g., who increased choice of the larger payment with increases in its delay or who always chose the immediate payment) showed the same pattern on the other procedure. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that the loss discounting procedures and measures studied here all assess the same construct.