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rwallace comments on Time and Effort Discounting - Less Wrong
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Apart from the uncertainty about whether an agency will deliver a future reward at all, there is also the expenditure of resources in keeping track of and following up on a debt. If you have to keep track of a debt for a year, and take action to claim it at the end of that time, that could very well cost more than $50 worth of time and energy, particularly when you take into account the need to spend resources retaliating if the debtor fails to pay. I think it is much more plausible that people use ad hoc heuristics developed to deal with these issues, than that we actually use a hyperbolic discount function.
Pigeons also discount hyperbolically.
... as, according to the paper you linked, do rats. Good point. Can this be explained in similar ways? A pigeon or rat's environment could surely provide uncertainty about whether a future reward will be delivered at all. Time and energy spent keeping track of a future reward might still be a significant cost. Could these factors have selected for neural circuits that just apply a hyperbolic discount function as a default in the absence of specific reason to do otherwise? This does seem to be evidence suggesting the answer might be yes.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ss/babies_and_bunnies_a_caution_about_evopsych/1o4d
Naturally-occurring cases where hyperbolic discounting leads to suboptimal solutions are relatively rare, and at least one seems to have evolved a patch.
Those issues seem pretty common. Why would nature not use hyperbolic discounting - and then use ad hoc heuristics to patch it in cases where it doesn't apply?
Yeah, the paper Yvain linked, seems to be providing evidence that a hyperbolic discount function may be the first-order heuristic for handling such issues, with patches applied where appropriate.