Ren-Raw Chen is a professor in the Finance Area of the Graduate School of Business Administration at Fordham University in New York, NY. [email protected] This article is motivated by the fact that the majority of securities in the financial markets are not frequently traded and hence a discount can be applied to properly ref lect such a deprived privilege. First, only a small fraction of corpo...

We propose a theory of intertemporal choice that is robust to specific assumptions on the discount rate. One class of models requires that one utility stream be chosen over another if and only if its discounted value is higher for all discount factors in a set. Another model focuses on an average discount factor. Yet another model is pessimistic, and evaluates a flow by the lowest available dis...

2. Offer Patient Discounts Only to Self-Pay Patients Discounts, such as prompt-pay and cash-up-front discounts, should not be given to insured patients in Wisconsin. Interestingly, the federal AKS allows legitimate discounts reflecting actual savings to the provider.5 However, such discounts would be considered a reduction or elimination of cost-sharing amounts, which are prohibited by Wis. Sta...

The forensic economics literature hosts a continuing debate about the appropriateness of using historical verses current rates to predict future net discount rates. If the net discount rate series is stationary, which means that shocks are transitory and the series reverts to a long-term mean value, estimates based on historical values are reasonable. Alternatively, if the series exhibits a uni...

This paper provides new evidence supporting the rationality of closed-end fund discounts by analyzing the time-series dynamics of individual fund discounts and their relation to portfolio performance and manager turnover. We show that discount changes reflect rational investor learning about fund manager skills, as well as investor anticipation of manager replacement events. Specifically, prior...

We assess the impact of institutions on Chinese firms’ corporate investment in an investment Euler equation framework. We allow the variables measuring institutions to affect the rate at which firm managers discount future investment payoffs. Applying generalized method of moments estimators to large samples of Chinese firms, we estimate the stochastic discount rates derived from actual investm...

Most algorithms for solving Markov decision processes rely on a discount factor, which ensures their convergence. It is generally assumed that using an artificially low discount factor will improve the convergence rate, while sacrificing the solution quality. We however demonstrate that using an artificially low discount factor may significantly improve the solution quality, when used in approx...

A Flexible Test for Present Bias and Time Preferences Using Land-Lease Contracts When agents have present bias, they discount more between now and the next period than between period t (> 1) and t + 1. How fast the future discount rate (evaluated today) decays is an empirical question. We show that the discount function can be non-parametrically identified with contracts that specify payments t...

The objective of this paper is to determine the socially optimal discount rate for public investment projects that entail costs and benefits in the very long run. We suppose that there is an exogenous process for the growth of consumption per capita, which is stochastic. We first evaluate the determinants of the discount rate for a specific horizon when the representative agent has a recursive ...

In recent years, work has been done to develop the theory of General Reinforcement Learning (GRL). However, there are no examples demonstrating the known results regarding generalised discounting. We have added to the GRL simulation platform (AIXIjs) the functionality to assign an agent arbitrary discount functions, and an environment which can be used to determine the effect of discounting on ...