Once Upon a Time Preference - How Rationality and Risk Aversion Change the Rationale for Discounting

Christian Traeger

No 3793, CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo

Abstract: The paper develops an axiomatic framework for rational decision making. The von Neumann-Morgenstern axioms give rise to a richer risk attitude than that captured in the standard discounted expected utility model. I derive three models that permit a more comprehensive risk evaluation. These preference representations differ regarding the consistency requirements that are imposed in the evaluation of uncertain scenarios. Imposing all rationality constraints jointly eliminates pure time preference from economic evaluation. The resulting preference representation still gives reduced weight to expected future utility when uncertainty increases over time. The more we know about the future welfare consequences of our (in)actions, the more weight they receive. If uncertainty is endogenous to the decision process, the new rationale for discounting will yield quite different policy implications than the discounted expected utility model based on pure time preference.

Keywords: time preference; discounting; uncertainty; expected utility; recursive utility; risk aversion; intertemporal substitutability; stationarity; certainty additivity; temporal lotteries; intertemporal risk aversion; temporal resolution of risk; discount rate (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D01 D60 D81 D91 H43 Q01 Q51 Q54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.cesifo.org/DocDL/cesifo1_wp3793.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 503 Service Unavailable

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ces:ceswps:_3793

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CESifo Working Paper Series from CESifo Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Klaus Wohlrabe ().