Joint comment on "when does duration matter in judgment and decision making?" (Ariely & Loewenstein, 2000).

Recent research has demonstrated that people care about the temporal relationships within a sequence of experiences. There is considerable evidence that people pay particular attention to the way experiences improve or deteriorate over time and to their maximum (peak) and final values. D. Kahneman and coauthors suggested in earlier articles that people ignore or severely underweight duration (which they referred to as duration neglect). In the preceding article, D. Ariely and G. Loewenstein (2000) challenged the generalizability of these findings and their normative implications. In the current commentary, D. Ariely, D. Kahneman, and G. Loewenstein jointly examine the issue to provide a better understanding of what they feel they have learned from this literature and to discuss the remaining open questions.

Duke Scholars

Author Dan Ariely Fuqua School of Business