The standard continuous-time version of discounted utility does not possess the local inter-temporal substitution property (quantities consumed in nearby dates should be close substitutes, not complements), and hence does not define a continuous functional in the space of consumption paths. The...

When a consumer purchases an item, the presumption is that the benefit obtained from it exceeds the price paid—we can think of this difference as the consumer profit. How do consumers calculate this profit, especially when they do not immediately consume the purchased item? This technical note...

The satiation utility model - a modification of discounted utility satisfying local substitution - predicts that optimal consumption sequences are U-shaped (high at the very beginning, constant in the middle, and high at the very end). To test this prediction we collect two datasets of musical...