This paper contributes to the theory of average rate of change (ARC) measurement. The
contribution is twofold. First, it relates ARC measurement and intertemporal choice. We show that a measure
of ARC can be identified with the discount rate under which an economic agent is indifferent between
initial and final temporal states of the variable considered. That is, there is a correspondence between
ARC measures and one-parametric families of time preferences over the “prize-time” space indexed by a
parameter representing the discount rate. Second, we derive ARC measures that correspond to some basic
time preference models and provide axiomatic foundations for them. The obtained axiomatizations can be
considered as characterizations of either the advocated ARC measures or the underlying families of time
preferences.