If you’re offered a choice of $100 today or $200 next year, which would you choose? The $200, right? You would if your goal were to make the most money from the opportunity. Strangely, most people don’t make that choice. Economists have long known that even though people prefer big rewards over small ones, they have an even stronger preference for present rewards over future ones—even when the future rewards are MUCH BIGGER. It’s an ordinary occurrence, oddly named hyperbolic discounting—the farther away a reward is in the future, the smaller the immediate motivation to achieve it.
