Self-Report Decay Rate

Self-Report Decay Rate is the speed at which a stated preference loses predictive value after the moment it was captured. A survey answer is a snapshot of intent under the conditions of that day: pricing shown, competitor set known, feature list current. Agencies that treat every response as durable evidence build strategy on a decaying asset. The framework asks one question per data point: how many weeks until this claim needs re-verification? Conversational capture through Typeform shortens the interval because adaptive follow-ups probe the same intent twice in one session, while behavioral tools record what people did rather than what they said. Pair the two and you get a defensible read. The practical discipline is a re-test calendar: any self-reported finding older than one quarter gets re-run before it anchors a client recommendation. Anthropic's biology lab ran 950 agents and processed 210 million tokens in under 24 hours, which shows how cheap re-verification has become relative to the cost of a wrong retainer decision.