Testable Implications of Models of Intertemporal Choice

Echenique, Federico; Imai, Taisuke and Saito, Kota (January 2018): Testable Implications of Models of Intertemporal Choice. Exponential Discounting and Its Generalizations.

Abstract

[This paper subsumes the paper "Testable Implication of Exponential Discounting" (2014) circulated as Caltech Social Science Working Paper 1381.]

We present the first revealed-preference characterizations of the most common models of intertemporal choice: the model of exponentially discounted concave utility, and some of its generalizations. Ours is the first axiomatization of these models taking consumption data as primitives. Our characterizations provide non-parametric revealed-preference tests. We apply our test to data from a recent experiment, and find that our axiomatization delivers new insights and perspectives on a dataset that had been analyzed by traditional parametric methods.

• Item Type: Paper
• Faculties: Economics > Chairs > Seminar for Economic Theory
• Subjects: 300 Social sciences > 330 Economics
• Language: English