Time discounting (or time preference) is the tendency to weigh present events over future events. Immediate gratification is preferred to delayed gratification, especially over longer periods of time and with younger children or adolescents. For example, a child may prefer one piece of candy now instead of five pieces of candy in four months. The longer the duration of time, the more people tend to forget about the future effects. Drawing again from the candy example, even though five pieces of candy are more gratifying than one, the fact that it will take four months to receive such gratification may cause a child to overlook the fact that he/she will be much more satisfied in the future. This pattern is sometimes referred to as hyperbolic discounting or "present bias" because people's judgements are bias toward present events. Economists often cite time discounting as a source of mispredictions of future utility.