The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Chabris, Christopher F., David Laibson, Carrie L. Morris, Jonathon P. Schuldt, and Dmitry Taubinsky. 2008. Individual laboratorymeasured discount rates predict field behavior. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty 37, no. 2-3: 237-269. Published Version ABSTRACT We estimate discount rates of 555 subjects using a laboratory task and find that these individual discount

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... es predict inter-individual variation in field behaviors (e.g., exercise, BMI, smoking). The correlation between the discount rate and each field behavior is small: none exceeds 0.28 and many are near 0. However, the discount rate has at least as much predictive power as any variable in our dataset (e.g., sex, age, education). The correlation between the discount rate and field behavior rises when field behaviors are aggregated: these correlations range from 0.09-0.38. We present a model that explains why specific intertemporal choice behaviors are only weakly correlated with discount rates, even though discount rates robustly predict aggregates of intertemporal decisions.