Time flips and price dips: Modeling preference reversals between intertemporal choice and pricing

Measuring the role of time in subjective value is essential to understanding human decision-making. Subjective value for delayed prospects can be elicited through binary choices between options or through price equivalents, yet these methods systematically diverge, producing preference reversals in which people select smaller-sooner options in choice but assign higher bids to larger-later options. Rather than reflecting genuinely unstable preferences, we show these reversals arise from a cognitive process specific to pricing: dynamic anchoring on the payoff of the prospect being evaluated. We develop a price accumulation model that incorporates this anchoring and adjustment process, and fit it to both pricing and choice data using a deep learning approach to likelihood-free parameter estimation. Across three studies involving a large representative pricing sample (N = 300), a smaller within-participant gains experiment, and a within-participant losses experiment, we show that the same underlying discount rate governs both choice and pricing, and that preference reversals can be explained by the anchoring component present in pricing but absent in choice. Extending this to delayed losses, we find that apparent loss aversion in pricing is similarly driven by stronger anchoring rather than by changes in discounting, while loss aversion in choice reflects shallower discounting rates for losses relative to gains. These findings reconcile choice-price inconsistencies under a common theory of value and suggest that pricing-based approaches may offer a practical pathway for reducing impulsive decision-making.