Time lotteries and stochastic impatience

Patrick DeJarnette, David Dillenberger, Daniel Gottlieb () and Pietro Ortoleva

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: We study preferences over lotteries in which both the prize and the payment date are uncertain. In particular, a time lottery is one in which the prize is fixed but the date is random. With Expected Discounted Utility, individuals must be risk seeking over time lotteries (RSTL). In an incentivized experiment, however, we find that almost all subjects violate this property. Our main contributions are theoretical. We first show that within a very broad class of models, which includes many forms of nonexpected utility and time discounting, it is impossible to accommodate even a single violation of RSTL without also violating a property we termed Stochastic Impatience, a risky counterpart of standard Impatience. We then present two positive results. If one wishes to maintain Stochastic Impatience, violations of RSTL can be accommodated by keeping Independence within periods while relaxing it across periods. If, instead, one is willing to forego Stochastic Impatience, violations of RSTL can be accommodated with a simple generalization of Expected Discounted Utility, obtained by imposing only the behavioral postulates of Discounted Utility and Expected Utility.

Keywords: time lotteries; stochastic impatience; risk and time preferences; expected discounted utility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C81 C91 D90 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 38 pages
Date: 2020-03-20
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-ore and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (19)

Published in Econometrica, 20, March, 2020, 88(2), pp. 619 - 656. ISSN: 0012-9682

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http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/102564/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Time Lotteries and Stochastic Impatience (2020)
Working Paper: Time Lotteries and Stochastic Impatience (2018)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:102564

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