| 来源类型 | Working Paper
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| 规范类型 | 报告
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| DOI | 10.3386/w23254
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| 来源ID | Working Paper 23254
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| Myopia and Discounting |
| Xavier Gabaix; David Laibson
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| 发表日期 | 2017-03-20
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| 出版年 | 2017
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| 语种 | 英语
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| 摘要 | We study perfectly patient agents who estimate the value of future events by generating noisy, unbiased simulations and combining those signals with priors to form posteriors. These posterior expectations exhibit as-if discounting: agents make choices as if they were maximizing a stream of known utils weighted by a discount function, D(t): This as-if discount function reflects the fact that estimated future utils are a combination of signals and priors, so average expectations are optimally shaded toward the mean of the prior distribution, generating behavior that partially mimics the properties of classical time preferences. When the simulation noise has variance that is linear in the event’s horizon, the as-if discount function is hyperbolic, D(t) = 1/(1 + αt). Our analysis includes a stripped-down Bayesian base case and two complementary, psychologically-enriched extensions: (i) the agent also uses the value of current rewards as an imperfect proxy for future rewards; (ii) the agent aggregates “building blocks” to construct a cognitively costly representation of the future, with predictive accuracy that improves as the number of building blocks increases. Our agents exhibit systematic preference reversals, but have no taste for commitment because they suffer from imperfect foresight, which is not a self-control problem. In our framework, agents exhibit less discounting if they have more domain-relevant experience, are more intelligent, or are encouraged to spend more time thinking about an intertemporal tradeoff. Agents who are unable to think carefully about an intertemporal tradeoff – e.g., due to cognitive load – exhibit more discounting. More myopia tends to coincide with more projection bias. In our framework, patience is unstable, fluctuating situationally with the accuracy of forecasting. |
| 主题 | Microeconomics
; Behavioral Economics
; Households and Firms
; Macroeconomics
; Consumption and Investment
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| URL | https://www.nber.org/papers/w23254
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| 来源智库 | National Bureau of Economic Research (United States)
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| 引用统计 |
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| 资源类型 | 智库出版物
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| 条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/580928
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推荐引用方式
GB/T 7714 |
Xavier Gabaix,David Laibson. Myopia and Discounting. 2017.
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文件名：
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w23254.pdf
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格式：
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Adobe PDF
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