Impulsiveness & Patience

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

year	variable	count	mean	sd
2008	plh0254	19635	5.09	2.19
2008	plh0253	19643	6.07	2.28
2013	plh0254	19107	5.18	2.21
2013	plh0253	19114	6.18	2.34
2018	plh0254	25910	5.03	2.30
2018	plh0253	25936	6.00	2.45