Financial Literacy and the Functional Shape of Subjective Time Deformation in Intertemporal Choice

Intertemporal decisions are commonly summarized by a single discount parameter, although individuals with similar overall discounting intensity may value short-, medium-, and long-term delays differently. This study investigates whether financial literacy is associated with these horizon-specific differences by treating reconstructed subjective time as a functional rather than scalar outcome. Data were collected through a multilingual online questionnaire administered to a convenience and snowball sample of 140 adults, who provided hypothetical equivalence judgments for a future reward of EUR 100 over 13 horizons from 7 days to 5 years, a three-item financial-literacy measure, and measures of temporal perception. Individual discount trajectories were reconstructed and analyzed with function-on-scalar regression, allowing the association with financial literacy to vary across the temporal domain. Because the normalized subjective-time trajectory is not identifiable for flat or reconstruction-degenerate discount profiles, the primary functional analysis included 59 participants, while complementary analyses used the full analytical sample. The primary model provided no evidence of a robust linear association between financial literacy and subjective-time deformation. An exploratory categorical specification indicated heterogeneity across financial-literacy levels and departure from a linear-score representation, although individual contrasts were imprecise and sensitive to specification. The relationship between financial literacy and intertemporal valuation may thus be more complex than a monotonic score effect, and functional data analytics can reveal horizon-specific structure that scalar summaries obscure. Given the convenience sample and the reduced identified sample, the results are exploratory and require validation in larger independent samples.