A STATE OF THE ART STATISTICAL STUDY OF EATING A MARSHMALLOW. Tyler Cowen at the Marginal Revolution website linked to a study of “delay discounting” at the Frontiers of Psychology website. The paper is by William Hampton, Nima Asadi, and Ingrid Olson. Cowen quotes from the paper: “We found that delay discounting is more predictive of income than age, ethnicity, or height.” The title of the paper is: “Good Things for Those Who Wait: Predictive Modeling Highlights Importance of Delay Discounting for Income Attainment”
The paper deals with the issues of the marshmallow experiment—whether a person (a child) who is good at deferring pleasure (who can wait for a second cookie) will have more success in life.”Delay discounting” refers to how much a gratification is discounted if it is delayed.
Kids, I think this paper is an example of the state of the art in statistical work—much more difficult than what I learned how to read fifty years ago. I can only note that the data base had 3000 participants. The participants were recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (So called as a homage to “The Turk”, which was a mechanical chess playing automaton created by Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen in 1769).