Tracking Costs of Time and Money: How Accounting Periods Affect Mental Accounting

After people incur costs to get future benefits, they usually track these costs in their mental accounts and are keen to receive the benefits when they become available. We introduce the notion that costs and benefits can occur either in the same accounting period (day, season, etc.) or in different periods. Our key argument is that monetary costs are tracked across accounting periods but that temporal costs are written off at the end of the...