Humans frequently need to allocate resources across multiple time-steps. Economic theory
proposes that subjects do so according to a stable set of intertemporal preferences, but the
computational demands of such decisions encourage the use of formally less competent
heuristics. Few empirical studies have examined dynamic resource allocation decisions
systematically. Here we conducted an experiment involving the dynamic consumption over
approximately 15 minutes of a limited budget of relief from moderately painful stimuli. We
had previously elicited the participants’ time preferences for the same painful stimuli in oneoff
choices, allowing us to assess self-consistency. Participants exhibited three characteristic
behaviors: saving relief until the end, spreading relief across time, and early spending, of
which the last was markedly less prominent. The likelihood that behavior was heuristic rather
than normative is suggested by the weak correspondence between one-off and dynamic
choices. We show that the consumption choices are consistent with a combination of simple
heuristics involving early-spending, spreading or saving of relief until the end, with subjects
predominantly exhibiting the last two.