Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-dh8gc Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-10T15:31:36.488Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Uncertainty about future payoffs makes impatience rational

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 November 2017

James Holland Jones
James Holland Jones*
Affiliation:
Department of Earth System Science, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-4216. jhj1@stanford.eduhttps://profiles.stanford.edu/james-jones
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Uncertainty (i.e., variable payoffs with unknown probabilities) brings together a number of features of the authors' argument. It leads to present bias, even for completely rational agents with time-consistent preferences. As an evolutionary product of Pleistocene climate instability, humans possess broad adaptations to environmental uncertainty, giving rise to key features of the behavioral constellation of deprivation (BCD).

Type
Open Peer Commentary
Information
Behavioral and Brain Sciences , Volume 40 , 2017 , e330
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Ainslie, G. (1975) Specious reward – Behavioral theory of impulsiveness and impulse control. Psychological Bulletin 82(4):463–96.Google Scholar
Anklin, M., Barnola, J. M., Beer, J., Blunier, T., Chappellaz, J., Clausen, H. B., Dahljensen, D., Dansgaard, W., Deangelis, M., Delmas, R. J., Duval, P., Fratta, M., Fuchs, A., Fuhrer, K., Gundestrup, N., Hammer, C., Iversen, P., Johnsen, S., Jouzel, J., Kipfstuhl, J., Legrand, M., Lorius, C., Maggi, V., Miller, H., Moore, J. C., Oeschger, H., Orombelli, G., Peel, D. A., Raisbeck, G., Raynaud, D., Schotthvidberg, C., Schwander, J., Shoji, H., Souchez, R., Stauffer, B., Steffensen, J. P., Stievenard, M., Sveinbjornsdottir, A., Thorsteinsson, T. & Wolff, E. W. (1993) Climate instability during the last interglacial period recorded in the GRIP ice core. Nature 364(6434):203–207.Google Scholar
Banerjee, A. V. & Duflo, E. (2011) Poor economics: A radical rethinking of the way to fight global poverty. PublicAffairs.Google Scholar
Bernheim, B. D., Ray, D. & Yeltekin, Ş. (2015) Poverty and self-control. Econometrica 83(5):1877–911.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Collins, D., Morduch, J., Rutherford, S. & Ruthven, O. (2010) Portfolios of the poor: How the world's poor live on $2 a day. Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Dasgupta, P. & Maskin, E. (2005) Uncertainty and hyperbolic discounting. American Economic Review 95(4):1290–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
deMenocal, P. B. (1995) Plio-Pleistocene African climate. Science 270(5233):53–59.Google Scholar
deMenocal, P. B. (2004) African climate change and faunal evolution during the Pliocene–Pleistocene. Earth and Planetary Science Letters 220(1–2):3–24.Google Scholar
Halevy, Y. (2008) Strotz meets Allais: Diminishing impatience and the certainty effect. American Economic Review 98(3):1145–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Herrnstein, R. J. (1961) Relative and absolute strength of response as a function of frequency of reinforcement. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior 4(3):267–72.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jackson, M. O. & Yariv, L. (2014) Present bias and collective dynamic choice in the lab. American Economic Review 104(12):4184–204.Google Scholar
Jones, J. H. (2005) Fetal programming: Adaptive life-history tactic or making the best of a bad start? American Journal of Human Biology 17(1):22–33.Google Scholar
Jones, J. H. (2011) Primates and the evolution of long, slow life histories. Current Biology 21(18):R708–17.Google Scholar
Jones, J. H. (2015) Resource transfers and human life-history evolution. Annual Review of Anthropology 44(1):513–31.Google Scholar
Knight, F. H. (1921) Risk, uncertainty and profit. Houghton Mifflin Company.Google Scholar
Laibson, D. (1997) Golden eggs and hyperbolic discounting. Quarterly Journal of Economics 112(2):443–78.Google Scholar
Loewenstein, G. (1996) Out of control: Visceral influences on behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 65(3):272–92.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mullainathan, S. & Shafir, E. (2013) Scarcity: Why having too little means so much. Times Books, Macmillan and Henry Holt.Google Scholar
Nettle, D. (2010a) Dying young and living fast: Variation in life history across English neighborhoods. Behavioral Ecology 21(2):387–95.Google Scholar
Sozou, P. D. (1998) On hyperbolic discounting and uncertain hazard rates. Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 265(1409):2015–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tuljapurkar, S. (1990) Population dynamics in variable environments, vol. 85. Springer-Verlag.Google Scholar
Yaari, M. E. (1965) Uncertain lifetime, life insurance, and the theory of the consumer. Review of Economic Studies 32(2):137–50.Google Scholar