IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/oup/restud/v53y1986i5p877-882..html
   My bibliography  Save this article

On the Existence of Markov-Consistent Plans under Production Uncertainty

Author

Listed:
  • B. Douglas Bernheim
  • Debraj Ray

Abstract

Strotz (1956) and Pollak (1968) were among the first to study the behaviour of an economic agent whose preferences change over time. They suggested that such an agent would choose a "consistent plan" which they described as "the best plan that he would actually follow". A Markov-consistent plan has a particularly simple structure: current decisions are independent of past decisions, except insofar as past decisions affect the current values of state variables. Unfortunately, Markov-consistent plans do not generally exist. In this paper, we demonstrate that the existence problem dissappears for finite horizon problems when one introduces even a small amount of smooth uncertainty into production.

Suggested Citation

  • B. Douglas Bernheim & Debraj Ray, 1986. "On the Existence of Markov-Consistent Plans under Production Uncertainty," The Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economic Studies Ltd, vol. 53(5), pages 877-882.
    • Handle: RePEc:oup:restud:v:53:y:1986:i:5:p:877-882.
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.2307/2297724
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Balbus, Łukasz & Reffett, Kevin & Woźny, Łukasz, 2018. "On uniqueness of time-consistent Markov policies for quasi-hyperbolic consumers under uncertainty," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 176(C), pages 293-310.
    2. Boldrin, Michele, 2005. "Public education and capital accumulation," Research in Economics, Elsevier, vol. 59(2), pages 85-109, June.
    3. Caplin, Andrew & Leahy, John, 2006. "The recursive approach to time inconsistency," Journal of Economic Theory, Elsevier, vol. 131(1), pages 134-156, November.
    4. Łukasz Balbus & Kevin Reffett & Łukasz Woźny, 2015. "Time consistent Markov policies in dynamic economies with quasi-hyperbolic consumers," International Journal of Game Theory, Springer;Game Theory Society, vol. 44(1), pages 83-112, February.
    5. Doruk Cetemen & Felix Zhiyu Feng & Can Urgun, 2019. "Contracting with Non-Exponential Discounting: Moral Hazard and Dynamic Inconsistency," Working Papers 2019-17, Princeton University. Economics Department..
    6. Lilia Maliar & Serguei Maliar, 2016. "Ruling Out Multiplicity of Smooth Equilibria in Dynamic Games: A Hyperbolic Discounting Example," Dynamic Games and Applications, Springer, vol. 6(2), pages 243-261, June.
    7. Łukasz Balbus & Anna Jaśkiewicz & Andrzej S. Nowak, 2015. "Existence of Stationary Markov Perfect Equilibria in Stochastic Altruistic Growth Economies," Journal of Optimization Theory and Applications, Springer, vol. 165(1), pages 295-315, April.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oup:restud:v:53:y:1986:i:5:p:877-882.. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Oxford University Press (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://academic.oup.com/restud .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.