This paper examines intertemporal risk–taking in a stochastically growing economy with externalities in human capital accumulation where agents have preferences for social status. In order to isolate the effects of status concerns on long–run expected growth, the analysis is embedded in a nonexpected utility setting, which disentangles the effects from risk aversion and intertemporal substituti...

Inter-temporal aggregation results in a summarization of information and a natural delay in the release of information. We study a principal-agent model and show that inter-temporal aggregation can be an optimal feature of a performance evaluation system. We also contrast the value of additional information when existing information is inter-temporally aggregated with its value when existing in...

This chapter reviews models of intertemporal choice consumption demand and labour supply. We discuss optimal decisions by individuals at the microeconomic level and the implications for the aggregate economy. The chapter describes the equilibrium in a market-clearing neoclassical model and analyses effects of productivity and government sector shocks on optimal decisions by consumers and worker...

Research on intertemporal behavior has emphasized trait-like variance. However, recent studies have begun to explore situational factors that affect intertemporal preference. In this study, we examined the associations between emotional primes and both behavior and brain function during intertemporal decision making. Twenty-two participants completed a dual task in which they were required to m...

Studies of animal impulsivity generally find steep subjective devaluation, or discounting, of delayed rewards - often on the order of a 50% reduction in value in a few seconds. Because such steep discounting is highly disfavored in evolutionary models of time preference, we hypothesize that discounting tasks provide a poor measure of animals' true time preferences. One prediction of this hypoth...

Intertemporal choice is a decision-making dilemma related to outcomes of different entity located at different time points. Economic and psychological literature on this topic showed the phenomen of temporal discounting, i.e., the proclivity to devalue the outcome distant in time on the basis of the time delay necessary to obtain it. The goals of this research are to investigate two different c...

OBJECTIVES Depression has been associated with impaired neural processing of reward and punishment. However, to date, little is known regarding the relationship between depression and intertemporal choice (delay discounting) for gain and loss. This examination is potentially important for advances in neuroeconomics of intertemporal choice, because depression is associated with reduced serotoner...

In this paper we examine how increases in intertemporal price uncertainty affect the welfare of a consumer. In the preference structure of the consumer the coefficient of relative risk aversion and the elasticity of intertemporal substitution (EIS) are parametrically independent. We find that under empirically plausible circumstances, for each given degree of risk aversion an increase in price ...

Heuristic models have been proposed for many domains of choice. We compare heuristic models of intertemporal choice, which can account for many of the known intertemporal choice anomalies, to discounting models. We conduct an out-of-sample, cross-validated comparison of intertemporal choice models. Heuristic models outperform traditional utility discounting models, including models of exponenti...

The constant rate discounted utility model is commonly used to represent intertemporal preferences in health care program evaluations. This paper examines the appropriateness of this model, and argues that the model fails both normatively and descriptively as a representation of individual intertemporal preferences for health outcomes. Variable rate discounted utility models are more flexible, ...