Econ Papers Daily / 期刊论文
社会贴现中的时间依赖聚合
Time-dependent aggregation in social discounting
摘要
This paper studies the aggregation of heterogeneous individual discount functions into a social discount function. Under the classical Pareto condition, time-additive preferences imply constant-weight aggregation, which severely restricts the form of social discounting and may conflict with time consistency. We show that weakening the Pareto requirement to comparisons between consumption streams that differ at only two periods leads to a broader class of admissible social discount functions, characterized as time-dependent weighted averages of individual discount functions. Stronger axioms further restrict this class and yield familiar methods such as the maximum discount function and exponential social discounting. The results provide an axiomatic foundation for social discounting in the presence of heterogeneous intertemporal preferences.
中文摘要
本文研究异质性个体贴现函数如何加总为社会贴现函数。在经典帕累托条件下，时间可加偏好意味着常权重加总，这严重限制了社会贴现的形式，并可能与时间一致性相冲突。我们表明，将帕累托要求弱化为仅对在两个时期上存在差异的消费流进行比较，可得到更广泛的一类可容许社会贴现函数，其特征为个体贴现函数的时间依赖加权平均。更强的公理进一步限制了这一类函数，并导出诸如最大贴现函数和指数型社会贴现等熟悉的方法。这些结果为存在异质性跨期偏好时的社会贴现提供了公理化基础。