Two experiments with undergraduates as subjects were carried out with the aim of replicating and extending previous results showing that the implication of the behavioral life-cycle hypothesis (H. M. Shefrin & R. H. Thaler, 1988) that people classify assets in different mental accounts (current...

The life-cycle theory of saving behavior (Modigliani, 1988) suggests that humans strive towards an equal intertemporal distribution of wealth. However, behavioral life-cycle theory (Shefrin & Thaler, 1988) proposes that people use self control heuristics to postpone wealth until later in life....

Since the advent of the discounted utility (DU) model economists have thought about intertemporal choice in very specific terms. DU assumes that people make explicit tradeoffs between costs and benefits occurring at different points in time. While this explicit tradeoff perspective is simple and...