Recent work on collective intertemporal choice suggests that non-dictatorial social preferences are generically time inconsistent. We argue that this claim conflates time consistency with two distinct properties of preferences: stationarity and time invariance. While the conjunction of time...

If social institutions, like fundraising, create incentives that generate utility from deciding to give, then some donors would decline a request to give to charity now while agreeing now to give later. This meets the classic definition of time-inconsistent choices. This is not because of a...

Recent work on collective intertemporal choice suggests that non-dictatorial social preferences are generically time inconsistent. We argue that this claim conflates time consistency with two distinct properties of preferences: stationarity and time invariance. While the conjunction of time...

We study a flexible dynamic savings game in continuous time, where decision makers rotate in and out of power. These agents value spending more highly while in power creating a time-inconsistency problem. We provide a sharp characterization of Markov equilibria. Our analysis proceeds by...

A stream of intertemporal monetary payoffs X first-order (second-order) temporarily dominates another stream Y if (the area below) the cumulative payoff function of X up till any moment of time is always at least as high as that of Y; or, equivalently, any rank-dependent discounted utility...

I present a model of consumption and savings for multi-person households in which members are imperfectly altruistic and share wealth. I show that, despite having standard exponential time preferences, the household is time-inconsistent: members save too little and overspend on private...

We develop a theory for stochastic control problems which, in various ways, are time inconsistent in the sense that they do not admit a Bellman optimality principle. We attach these problems by viewing them within a game theoretic framework, and we look for Nash subgame perfect equilibrium...

We motivate this paper with a puzzle. When we asked subjects to give five dollars to charity today, about 30 percent agree, but when the donation would instead be paid in one week, giving increases by 50 percent. The puzzle is that received models of self-control cannot explain this...