The conduct of a business with too much regard to short-run relative to longer-run results. For industry, this means spending too little on research and development, staff training, and investment in projects with a long lag in bringing in profits; for financial institutions, it means putting too much weight on short-term capital gains. Short-termism thus means discounting the future too heavily. The concept is necessarily subjective, as there is no objective way of deciding the correct rate at which future costs and benefits should be discounted.