Intertemporal Choices in Cloud Computing: Effects of Delay and Delay Horizon - An Experimental Study

Utility computing models such as cloud computing provide a variety of computing services using several pricing options. Flexibility of requirements and availability of pricing options, enable a consumer to make trade-offs between cost and time. These trade-offs are governed by consumers' behavior with respect to how they discount price vis-a-vis time of delivery. In this paper, we study this trade-off for the cloud-computing context, based on theoretical models from the time-discounting (intertemporal) literature. We test this model using an experimental study with 162 participants.