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The Pareto Comparisons of a Group of Exponential Discounters

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  • Christopher P. Chambers

    (Department of Economics, Georgetown University, Washington, District of Columbia 20007;)

  • Federico Echenique

    (Division of the Humanities and Social Sciences, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125)

Abstract

Agents with different discount factors disagree about some intertemporal trade-offs, but they will also agree sometimes. We seek to understand precisely the nature of their agreements and disagreements. A group of agents is identified with a set of discount factors. We characterize the comparisons that a given interval of discount factors will agree on, including what all discount factors in the interval [0, 1] will agree on. Our result is analogous to how all risk-averse and monotone agents agree on mean-preserving spreads. Motivated by a maxmin representation, we also characterize the comparisons that are consistent with some set of discount factors, when the set is not known or exogenously given. In other words, we describe the Pareto comparisons that are consistent with a society, or group, of exponentially discounting agents.

Suggested Citation

  • Christopher P. Chambers & Federico Echenique, 2020. "The Pareto Comparisons of a Group of Exponential Discounters," Mathematics of Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 45(2), pages 622-640, May.
    • Handle: RePEc:inm:ormoor:v:45:y:2020:i:2:p:622-640
    DOI: 10.1287/moor.2019.1004
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    Cited by:

    1. Chiaki Hara, 2019. "Heterogeneous Impatience of Individual Consumers and Decreasing Impatience of the Representative Consumer," KIER Working Papers 1009, Kyoto University, Institute of Economic Research.
    2. Takashi Hayashi & Noriaki Kiguchi & Norio Takeoka, 2024. "Temptation and self‐control for the impure benevolent planner: The case of heterogeneous discounting," Journal of Public Economic Theory, Association for Public Economic Theory, vol. 26(1), February.

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