Testable Implications of Models of Intertemporal Choice: Exponential Discounting and Its Generalizations

We present revealed-preference characterizations of the most common models of intertemporal choice: the model of exponentially discounted concave utility, and some of its generalizations. Our characterizations take consumption data as primitives, and provide nonparametric revealed-preference tests. We apply our tests to data from two recent experiments and find that our axiomatization delivers new insights and perspectives on datasets that had been analyzed by traditional parametric methods. (JEL C91, D11, D15)

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