—A series of studies shows that people value future events more than equivalent events in the equidistant
past. Whether people imagined being compensated or compensating others, they required and offered more compensation for events that would take place in the future
than for identical events that had taken place in the past.
This temporal value asymmetry (TVA) was robust in between-persons comparisons and absent in within-persons
comparisons, which suggests that participants considered
the TVA irrational. Contemplating future events produced
greater affect than did contemplating past events, and this
difference mediated the TVA. We suggest that the TVA, the
gain-loss asymmetry, and hyperbolic time discounting
can be unified in a three-dimensional value function that
describes how people value gains and losses of different
magnitudes at different moments in time.