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gjm comments on Participation in the LW Community Associated with Less Bias - Less Wrong Discussion
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I agree with your reasoning. I think it's sort of silly to suppose that selecting $55 implying a high discount rate is necessarily less rational. If someone offered you $1.00 today or $1.03 tomorrow, it would be a very strange person who decides that they would prefer the $1.03, even though that's a 4,848,172% rate of return. There are actually disutilities involved in keeping track of future cash inflows, even if small. But almost no one, even the triumphantly rich with very low marginal utilities associated with additional dollars, would prefer $55 million dollars now to $75 million dollars in 60 days. Perhaps drug addicts and the terminally ill would.
Of course, if someone said "Occasionally throughout your life we will surprise you with either $55 dollars, or $75 dollars 60 days later than the days we would have surprised you with $55," it would then be silly to choose the $55 dollar scenario, because in that case there are no disutilities.
Interestingly, the survey data actually doesn't seem to support the notion that those with higher incomes are more likely to take the money now. In fact, the data suggest that the wealthiest are slightly less likely to take the money today. For five quintiles, the P($55 now) is 8.4% for <$7,770, 6.2% for <$25K, 6.8% for <$50K, 6.4% for <$83K, and 5.0% for the top quintile. This is with N=593. This doesn't include any analysis for potentially confounding factors.
I'm puzzled by your use of the word "actually" in the last paragraph. It sounds as if you're saying you'd expect people with higher incomes to choose less money now over more money later. If so, why? I'd expect the reverse, for multiple reasons (and not only because apparently that's what the survey shows).
I was thinking that wealthier people would have a lower level of utility associated with the additional marginal dollars they could get from waiting, so transaction costs and other disutilities would override the utility offered by having a greater number of dollars. I said "actually" only because this thinking is sort of in line with what I was discussing in my first paragraph.
I would think that if our hypothetical wealthy person was rich enough to not care all that much about an additional $20 million, they wouldn't care enough about the initial $55 million to pick the short-term option that netted them less money.
If the utility of the dollars goes down, doesn't the utility loss from transaction costs also go down? (Because if you care less about the money you can worry less about it. Extreme case: If I offer to give you $0 in a week, you don't need to waste any time or effort keeping track of when I'm supposed to pay you.)