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The case of muddled units in temporal discounting

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Vincent, B. T. and Stewart, Neil (2020) The case of muddled units in temporal discounting. Cognition, 198 . 104203. doi:10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104203

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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104203

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Abstract

While parameters are crucial components of cognitive models, relatively little importance has been given to their units. We show that this has lead to some parameters to be contaminated, introducing an artifactual correlation between them. We also show that this has led to the illegal comparison of parameters with different units of measurement – this may invalidate parameter comparisons across participants, conditions, groups, or studies. We demonstrate that this problem affects two related models: Stevens' power law and Rachlin's delay discounting model. We show that it may even affect models which superficially avoid the incompatible units problem, such as hyperbolic discounting. We present simulation results to demonstrate the extent of the issues caused by the muddled units problem. We offer solutions in order to avoid the problem in the future or to aid in re-interpreting existing datasets.

Item Type: Journal Article
Divisions: Faculty of Social Sciences > Warwick Business School
Journal or Publication Title: Cognition
Publisher: Elsevier
ISSN: 0010-0277
Official Date: May 2020
Dates:
DateEvent
May 2020Published
31 January 2020Available
23 January 2020Accepted
Date of first compliant deposit: 29 January 2020
Volume: 198
Article Number: 104203
DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104203
Status: Peer Reviewed
Publication Status: Published
Access rights to Published version: Open Access
RIOXX Funder/Project Grant:
Project/Grant IDRIOXX Funder NameFunder ID
ES/N018192/ ; ES/P008976/1[ESRC] Economic and Social Research Councilhttp://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100000269
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