Consume Now or Later? Time Inconsistency, Collective Choice and Revealed Preference

Abi Adams

No 625, Economics Series Working Papers from University of Oxford, Department of Economics

Abstract: This paper develops a revealed preference methodology for exploring whether time inconsistencies in household choice are the product of nonstationarities at the individual level or the result of individual heterogeneity and renegotiation within the collective unit. An empirical application to household-level microdata highlights that an explicit recognition of the collective nature of choice allows the vast majority of household behaviour to be rationalised by theory that assumes preference stationarity at the individual level. For our particular short panel data set, simply permitting limited intrahousehold heterogeneity in time preferences allows the choices of 98.4% of the sample to be rationalised by a model that assumes exponential discounting at the individual level. We also find that couples characterized by lower divergece in spousal discount rates are older, more likely to have children and wealthier, which we take as indications of experiencing higher match quality.

Keywords: Time consistency; Collective choice; Full efficiency; Renegotiation; Revealed preference (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C14 D11 D12 D13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012-10-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Related works:
Journal Article: Consume Now or Later? Time Inconsistency, Collective Choice, and Revealed Preference (2014)
Working Paper: Consume now or later? Time inconsistency, collective choice and revealed preference (2014)
Working Paper: Consume now or later? Time inconsistency, collective choice and revealed preference (2012)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oxf:wpaper:625

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