This paper discusses the problem known in economics as ``backward dynamics''. In economic models of ``rational'' intertemporal behavior, agents' decisions at any given moment in time depend on their expectations of future values of some variables and, in the deterministic variants of those...

In discrete-time dynamical systems arising from economic problems, the length of the period (henceforth simply "period") separating two successive values of the state variables may play an essential role in determining the type of dynamics followed by the system. In economics, this fact is...