Closed-Form Solution of General Intertemporal Consumption Maximization Models

This paper considers explicit representations for very general (discrete and continuous-time) intertemporal consumption-maximization models which allow the instantaneous preferences of the consumer and the time-preference factors to vary over time and for the non-existence of utility functions, more than one generation of consumers with a given probability of death, many commodities, and, further, a wide class of preferences which do not necessarily satisfy the so-called “regularity conditions” (such as differentiability, strict convexity, boundedness, or continuity) and include most of the well-known preferences in literature.