Eliciting Individual Discount Rates in Thailand: A Tale of Two Cities

This paper aims to elicit individual discount rates in Thailand using real monetary incentives in the lab-in-the-field setting. We investigate the differences in the discount rates between two different districts with different socioeconomic characteristics. One represents rural agricultural society while another represents an urban industrialised society. We also compare the results between different elicitation methods. The paper provides two main insights. First, the elicited discount rates are significantly different between the two districts. Second, the discount rates also vary across time-horizon suggesting different risk consideration with respect to the time horizon. We also address an intertemporal experimental design issue that results should be indifferent between elicitation methods and find procedural invariant between the choice and matching tasks.