Time is a scarce and valuable resource for individuals, and reducing the duration of waiting time provides opportunity benefits. Understanding individual preferences for waiting time is important for predicting behaviors in many time-consuming and useless activities (e.g., transportation, queuing, waiting rooms in hospitals, etc.). Moreover, better knowledge of individual behavior towards waiting time is key to designing the improved organization of the activities. Our main research questions concern the shape of individual preferences towards waiting time and the induced properties of two routinely-used measures of it, the value of time (VOT) and the value of reliability (VOR). In most of the literature, waiting time is viewed as a non-market private bad (i.e., waiting time is unpleasant), and the decision maker (DM) has well-defined preferences over both consumption and (possibly random) waiting time. Our research questions concern the shape of the DM’s preferences towards waiting time and the induced properties of the VOT and the VOR when several components from behavioral economics or quality concerns are accounted for. Yet, several elements can impair the relationship between value and preferences predicted by the standard Beckerian theory. First, quality matters, especially the influence of reference points or the nature and the source of uncertainty. Secondly, the quality of the waiting time has been largely neglected in both theoretical and empirical literature, and we wish to close this gap. To answer our research questions, we would mainly rely on incentivized and controlled laboratory experiments and non-incentivized online experiments and will use theoretical investigations as a guide for those empirical settings. Third, because the results may have specific implications for transport policy and, more generally, for a better understanding of individual preferences and behavior involving waiting time, we aim to investigate how new welfare measures can be built upon the improved definition of VOT and VOR.