As an illustration of the gap between ideas and implementing their measurement, at the other end of the spectrum from the elegant insights of Hasler reproduced by Liam below is another account of time preferences, from probably the most peculiar task I've seen in the cognitive neuroscience literature. It is called the Continuous Delay Aversion Test, where the participant is instructed to prod a virtual donkey into spewing gold which is quite common in fairy tales seemingly though I must have missed that bit in Shrek!
Instructions from Muller et al. (2006)
"you have to collect gold from each of 30 “gold-donkeys”, which let out gold from their mouth, as in the fairy tale. The more gold you collect, the more of the video clip you can see. If you collect all the gold from the whole herd, you can see 120 s of the chosen clip. The donkeys only have a certain amount of gold to give. The gold is flowing very fast at the beginning, but soon the flow diminishes and finally the donkey is completely dried out and has no more gold to give. Because donkeys are stubborn, from time to time the donkeys stop letting out the gold, although they will still have some in their stomach, indicated by the stopping of the flow of gold and the appearance of a red question mark. In this case, you can wheedle more gold out of the donkey by pressing this button. If you don’t want to wait any longer for gold of a certain donkey, you can call the next donkey by pressing this button here."
Instructions from Muller et al. (2006)
"you have to collect gold from each of 30 “gold-donkeys”, which let out gold from their mouth, as in the fairy tale. The more gold you collect, the more of the video clip you can see. If you collect all the gold from the whole herd, you can see 120 s of the chosen clip. The donkeys only have a certain amount of gold to give. The gold is flowing very fast at the beginning, but soon the flow diminishes and finally the donkey is completely dried out and has no more gold to give. Because donkeys are stubborn, from time to time the donkeys stop letting out the gold, although they will still have some in their stomach, indicated by the stopping of the flow of gold and the appearance of a red question mark. In this case, you can wheedle more gold out of the donkey by pressing this button. If you don’t want to wait any longer for gold of a certain donkey, you can call the next donkey by pressing this button here."
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