Financial Literacy and the Functional Shape of Subjective Time Deformation in Intertemporal Choice
Abstract
Intertemporal decisions are commonly summarized by a single discount parameter, although individuals with similar overall discounting intensity may value short-, medium-, and long-term delays differently. This study investigates whether financial literacy is associated with these horizon-specific differences by treating reconstructed subjective time as a functional rather than scalar outcome. Data were collected through a multilingual online questionnaire administered to a convenience and snowball sample of 140 adults, who provided hypothetical equivalence judgments for a future reward of EUR 100 over 13 horizons from 7 days to 5 years, a three-item financial-literacy measure, and measures of temporal perception. Individual discount trajectories were reconstructed and analyzed with function-on-scalar regression, allowing the association with financial literacy to vary across the temporal domain. Because the normalized subjective-time trajectory is not identifiable for flat or reconstruction-degenerate discount profiles, the primary functional analysis included 59 participants, while complementary analyses used the full analytical sample. The primary model provided no evidence of a robust linear association between financial literacy and subjective-time deformation. An exploratory categorical specification indicated heterogeneity across financial-literacy levels and departure from a linear-score representation, although individual contrasts were imprecise and sensitive to specification. The relationship between financial literacy and intertemporal valuation may thus be more complex than a monotonic score effect, and functional data analytics can reveal horizon-specific structure that scalar summaries obscure. Given the convenience sample and the reduced identified sample, the results are exploratory and require validation in larger independent samples.
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BibTeX
@misc{maturo2026financial,
title = {{Financial Literacy and the Functional Shape of Subjective Time Deformation in Intertemporal Choice}},
author = {Fabrizio Maturo and Salvador Cruz Rambaud and Vincenzo Li Calzi and Andrea Mazzitelli and Annamaria Porreca},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = oct,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2610.26023},
eprint = {2610.26023},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26023},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Financial Literacy and the Functional Shape of Subjective Time Deformation in Intertemporal Choice
AU - Fabrizio Maturo
AU - Salvador Cruz Rambaud
AU - Vincenzo Li Calzi
AU - Andrea Mazzitelli
AU - Annamaria Porreca
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/10/19
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2610.26023
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26023
AB - Intertemporal decisions are commonly summarized by a single discount parameter, although individuals with similar overall discounting intensity may value short-, medium-, and long-term delays differently. This study investigates whether financial literacy is associated with these horizon-specific differences by treating reconstructed subjective time as a functional rather than scalar outcome. Data were collected through a multilingual online questionnaire administered to a convenience and snowball sample of 140 adults, who provided hypothetical equivalence judgments for a future reward of EUR 100 over 13 horizons from 7 days to 5 years, a three-item financial-literacy measure, and measures of temporal perception. Individual discount trajectories were reconstructed and analyzed with function-on-scalar regression, allowing the association with financial literacy to vary across the temporal domain. Because the normalized subjective-time trajectory is not identifiable for flat or reconstruction-degenerate discount profiles, the primary functional analysis included 59 participants, while complementary analyses used the full analytical sample. The primary model provided no evidence of a robust linear association between financial literacy and subjective-time deformation. An exploratory categorical specification indicated heterogeneity across financial-literacy levels and departure from a linear-score representation, although individual contrasts were imprecise and sensitive to specification. The relationship between financial literacy and intertemporal valuation may thus be more complex than a monotonic score effect, and functional data analytics can reveal horizon-specific structure that scalar summaries obscure. Given the convenience sample and the reduced identified sample, the results are exploratory and require validation in larger independent samples.
ER -