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Income Expectations, Limited Liquidity, and Anomalies in Intertemporal Choice

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  • Epper, Thomas
Abstract
Intertemporal choices are a ubiquitous part of our economic lives. Decisions about education, savings and health, all involve tradeoffs between costs and benefits materializing at different points in time. Yet, a large body of experimental evidence questions the descriptive validity of the economic benchmark model (exponential discounted utility) by documenting a series of behavioral patterns allegedly violating its key predictions. Observed discount rates typically lie far beyond market interest rates, tend to decline in time horizon and in outcome magnitude, and seem to be larger for gains than for losses. Hyperbolic preference models resolve these issues only partly: These models accommodate excessive short-run discounting, but fail to predict both outcome dependence and sign dependence. This paper demonstrates that all these “anomalies” are rationalizable without introducing exotic preferences. Instead, an interplay between liquidity constraints and income expectations is able to produce these stylized facts, even if economic agents are fully rational and have a pure rate of time preference close to the market interest rate. Liquidity-constrained agents who dislike fluctuations in the consumption path, but expect their income to rise in the near future prefer to allocate newly available cash inflows at earlier dates than their pure rate of time preference suggests. The assumptions underlying this mechanism are likely to hold for typical participants in laboratory and field experiments. Beyond that, our approach also provides an explanation for a number of phenomena which have remained largely unexplained so far, such as reasons for observed discount rates to increase in time delay, the heterogeneity of discount rates across different commodities and regions, and the co-occurrence of stationarity and dynamic inconsistency. The mechanism is easily distinguished from hyperbolic preferences and optimistic outlook, and its key predictions are retained under bounded rationality and partial asset integration.

Suggested Citation

  • Epper, Thomas, 2015. "Income Expectations, Limited Liquidity, and Anomalies in Intertemporal Choice," Economics Working Paper Series 1519, University of St. Gallen, School of Economics and Political Science.
    • Handle: RePEc:usg:econwp:2015:19
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Uttara Balakrishnan & Johannes Haushofer & Pamela Jakiela, 2020. "How soon is now? Evidence of present bias from convex time budget experiments," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 23(2), pages 294-321, June.
    2. Zhihua Li & Songfa Zhong, 2023. "Reference Dependence in Intertemporal Preference," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 69(1), pages 475-490, January.
    3. Rachel Cassidy, 2018. "Are the poor so present-biased?," IFS Working Papers W18/24, Institute for Fiscal Studies.
    4. Chen Sun & Jan Potters, 2022. "Magnitude effect in intertemporal allocation tasks," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 25(2), pages 593-623, April.
    5. Rachel Cassidy, 2018. "Are the poor so present-biased?," CSAE Working Paper Series 2018-19, Centre for the Study of African Economies, University of Oxford.
    6. Geng, Xin & Janssens, Wendy & Kramer, Berber N., 2017. "Liquid milk: Cash constraints and day-to-day intertemporal choice in financial diaries," IFPRI discussion papers 1602, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).
    7. Walid Merouani & Nacer-Eddine Hammouda & Claire El Moudden, 2018. "Do myopia and asymmetric information matter in the demand for social insurance?," Working Papers 1212, Economic Research Forum, revised 28 Jun 2018.

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Time Preferences; Intertemporal Choice; Hyperbolic Discounting; Magnitude Effect; Sign Effect; Stationarity; Time Inconsistency; Expectations; Liquidity Constraints;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • D03 - Microeconomics - - General - - - Behavioral Microeconomics: Underlying Principles
    • D84 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - Expectations; Speculations
    • D91 - Microeconomics - - Micro-Based Behavioral Economics - - - Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making

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