A közgazdaságtudományi közélet megújulásáért

Barna Bakó, Antal Ertl, Hubert János Kiss

MKE-WP-39149

This study investigates how present bias affects memory accuracy regarding earlier decisions in intertemporal decision-making. In a classroom experiment with university students, participants made choices between smaller, immediate rewards and larger, delayed rewards over two visits, followed by a third visit where they were asked to recall their prior decisions. Descriptive statistics reveal that participants with present bias exhibit lower memory accuracy compared to time-consistent peers, particularly in scenarios involving immediate rewards. Regression analysis confirms that motivated misremembering—recalling past decisions as more virtuous than they actually were—explains the reduced memory accuracy