Consumers are often unable to resist the temptation of overconsuming certain products such as cookies, crackers, soft drinks, alcohol, etc. To control their consumption, some consumers buy small packages or abstain from purchasing the product altogether. Other consumers, however, still purchase...

Microborrowers may take usurious loans to repay a loan taken from a micronance institution because of having neglected the time inconsistency of optimal plans or having discounted future payoffs too strongly from the ex-post perspective. Microfinance programs should strive at preventing such...

This paper constructs a structural retirement model with hyperbolic preferences and uses it to estimate the effect of several potential Social Security policy changes. Estimated effects of policies are compared using two models, one with hyperbolic preferences and one with standard exponential...

This paper uses introspection and deconstruction as tools to improve understanding of how decisions to purchase cars are made and how a person's preferences evolve in the long run. It is based on a much longer, downloadable account of experience with 18 cars over a 30-year period that involves...

This paper argues that, to be forward-looking in a logically consistent sense, a decision maker must take account of his overall well-being, not just his instantaneous utility, in all future periods. However, such a decision-maker is necessarily time inconsistent. The paper explores the...

This paper derives the properties of the discount rate that should be applied to a public-sector project when the affected population has heterogeneous degrees of impatience. We show that, for any distribution of discount rates, the social discount rate has the following properties: it decreases...

We address the problem of a social planner who, as in Weitzman, (2001), gathers data on experts' discount rates and wants to infer the social consumption discount rate. We propose an equilibrium approach and we analyze the expression and the properties of the resulting equilibrium discount rate....

We address the problem of a social planner who, as in Weitzman (2001), gathers data on discount rates and wants to infer the socially efficient consumption discount rate. We propose an equilibrium approach and we analyse the expression and the properties of the resulting equilibrium discount...

In this paper, we study the effects of fiscal policies on economy in a stochastic model with hyperbolic discounting rate. With specific assumptions on the production technology, preferences, and stochastic shocks, we derive the explicit solutions to the growth rates of consumption and savings...

We address the problem of a social planner who, as in Weitzman (2001), gathers data on experts discount rates and wants to infer the socially efficient consumption discount rate. We propose an equilibrium approach and we analyse the expression and the properties of the resulting equilibrium...