Impulsiveness & Patience 
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**Summary**

The measures of impulsiveness and patience are simple and ultra-short survey measures with the 
distinct advantage of gathering information on time preferences that are behaviorally relevant while at 
the same time being cheap to measure on a large and representative scale. Impulsiveness and patience 
has been measured at regular five-year intervals since 2008. 

**Theoretical Background**

Essentially, all economic decisions involve a time dimension and thus a trade-off between different 
payoffs or costs that accrue at different points in time. Patience (or the rate of time preference) is the 
central preference parameter that shapes such decisions over time.  

**Scale Development**

So far, there is still no reliable measure of patience in large-scale representative surveys, since direct 
measures of patience are typically elicited in laboratory experiments among particular (student) 
subject pools only. To fill this gap, a survey measure of patience and impulsiveness has been included 
in the SOEP. 
The measures for impulsiveness and patience were evaluated with an incentive-compatible 
intertemporal choice experiment for impatience. Individuals who state that they are more impatient 
also exhibit a higher degree of impatience in the incentivized choice experiment (see Vischer et al., 
2013). 

**References**

*Vischer, T., Dohmen, T., Falk, A., Huffman, D., Schupp, J., Sunde, U., & Wagner, G. G. (2013). 
Validating an ultra-short survey measure of patience. Economics Letters, 120, 142-145.*

**Items**

How would you describe yourself (Wie schätzen Sie sich persönlich ein):

Impulsiveness 

	1. Do you generally think things over for a long time before acting – in other words, are you not impulsive at all? Or do you generally act without thinking things over a long time – in other words, are you very impulsive? (Sind Sie im Allgemeinen ein Mensch, der lange überlegt und nachdenkt, bevor er handelt, also gar nicht impulsive ist? Oder sind Sie ein Mensch, der ohne lange zu überlegen handelt, also sehr impulsiv ist?) 

Scale: 0 (Not at all impulsive / Gar nicht impulsiv) to 10 (Very impulsive / Sehr impulsiv)

Patience

	2. Are you generally an impatient person, or someone who always shows great patience? (Sind Sie im Allgemeinen ein Mensch, der ungeduldig ist, oder der immer sehr viel Geduld aufbringt?)

Scale: 0 (Very impatient / Sehr ungeduldig) to 10 (Very patient / Sehr geduldig) 

**Items and Scale Statistics**

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