Application

It was found that the extent to which people discount the value of large but late rewards (LLR) in delay discounting experiments depends on how choice alternatives are described. Framing consists of reformulating how the other options are presented while preserving their economic value. One way to do this is to make explicit the outcome of the participant’s choice. In a typical delay-discounting task, a participant’s choice alternatives are presented in the following way: “Would you like to receive $100 now or $150 in one week?” When framed this way, participants often overlook their opportunity cost and the potential benefits they missed by choosing one alternative over the other because the $0 outcome is hidden. More precisely, choosing $100 now means getting $0 in one week, and choosing $150 in one week means getting $0 now. It was found that delay discounting is reduced when choice alternatives are framed so that the zero, in this case $0, is made explicit. This is known as the hidden-zero effect ( Dang et al., 2020 ; Magen, Dweck and Gross, 2008 ; Read, Olivola and Hardisty, 2017 ). This is a puzzling phenomenon because both ways of presenting the alternatives lead to the same outcome.