Aim: The discounted utility (DU) model has dominated economic evaluation for almost 7 decades, despite the fact that important assumptions of the model are commonly found to be violated. This paper formally explores whether the key assumption of stationarity is violated in a sample of the...

The time preferences of our sample are better represented by the L & P and the Mazur models (which allow relaxation of the stationarity assumption through a modification of the expression for the discount factor) and less well reflected by the Harvey (a modification of the L & P model that...