Related papers: Discounting and Impatience
This paper examines the extent to which individual time preferences are associated with the willingness to accept different tax burdens. The first is an intertemporal redistribution in which a current consumption tax increase is exchanged…
By embedding uncertainty into time, we obtain a conjoint axiomatic characterization of both Exponential Discounting and Subjective Expected Utility that accommodates arbitrary state and outcome spaces. In doing so, we provide a novel and…
This paper employs an intra-personal game-theoretic framework to investigate how decreasing impatience influences irreversible investment behaviors in a continuous-time setting. We consider a capacity expansion problem under weighted…
A firm that sells a non perishable product considers intertemporal price discrimination in the objective of maximizing its long-run average revenue. We consider a general model of patient customers with changing valuations. Arriving…
In many finite horizon episodic reinforcement learning (RL) settings, it is desirable to optimize for the undiscounted return - in settings like Atari, for instance, the goal is to collect the most points while staying alive in the long…
This paper assumes each individual in society has a random discount factor and assesses an intertemporal project using rank-dependent expected utility theory. We consider both the ex ante and the ex post approaches. For the former, we show…
Stochastic games with discounted payoff, introduced by Shapley, model adversarial interactions in stochastic environments where two players try to optimize a discounted sum of rewards. In this model, long-term weights are geometrically…
People often face trade-offs between costs and benefits occurring at various points in time. The predominant discounting approach is to use the exponential form. Central to this approach is the discount rate, a unique parameter that…
This paper considers a time-varying optimization problem associated with a network of systems, with each of the systems shared by (and affecting) a number of individuals. The objective is to minimize cost functions associated with the…
Large amounts of evidence suggest that trust levels in a country are an important determinant of its macroeconomic growth. In this paper, we investigate one channel through which trust might support economic performance: through the levels…
We study intertemporal decision making under uncertainty. We fully characterize discounted expected utility in a framework \`a la Savage. Despite the popularity of this model, no characterization is available in this setting. The concept of…
We begin by formulating and characterizing a dominance criterion for prize sequences: $x$ dominates $y$ if any impatient agent prefers $x$ to $y$. With this in hand, we define a notion of comparative patience. Alice is more patient than Bob…
We study a \emph{financial} version of the classic online problem of scheduling weighted packets with deadlines. The main novelty is that, while previous works assume packets have \emph{fixed} weights throughout their lifetime, this work…
Reinforcement learning (RL) agents have traditionally been tasked with maximizing the value function of a Markov decision process (MDP), either in continuous settings, with fixed discount factor $\gamma < 1$, or in episodic settings, with…
An important question in economics is how people choose between different payments in the future. The classical normative model predicts that a decision maker discounts a later payment relative to an earlier one by an exponential function…
Evaluating the financial performance of manufacturing firms requires consideration of both the time value of money and the relative importance of multiple decision criteria. Conventional approaches relying solely on deterministic…
Economists modeled self-control problems in decisions of people with the time-inconsistence preferences model. They argued that the source of self-control problems could be uncertainty and temptation. This paper uses an experimental test…
We develop a general model for finding the optimal penal strategy based on the behavioral traits of the offenders. We focus on how the discount rate (level of time discounting) affects criminal propensity on the individual level, and how…
Present bias, the tendency to overvalue immediate rewards while undervaluing future ones, is a well-known barrier to achieving long-term goals. As artificial intelligence and behavioral economics increasingly focus on this phenomenon, the…
In settings where users both need high accuracy and are time-pressured, such as doctors working in emergency rooms, we want to provide AI assistance that both increases decision accuracy and reduces decision-making time. Current literature…