We characterize environments having a representative agent: an agent whose preferences over aggregate alternatives correspond to a weighted average of the population's utilities for the disaggregated alternatives. The existence of a representative agent imposes strong restrictions on individual...

We propose a novel utility representation for preferences over risky timed outcomes. The weighted temporal utility model generalizes many well known utility functions for intertemporal decision making under risk. A decision maker with a weighted temporal utility function can have time consistent...

We study the optimal provision of social security in a dynamically efficient economy using a continuous-time overlapping-generations model in which consumers have short planning horizons. The short-horizon mechanism leads to dynamic optimization that is time-inconsistent over the life cycle. Our...