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arXiv · 2407.02323

Comparative Patience

Mark Whitmeyer
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Abstract

We begin by formulating and characterizing a dominance criterion for prize sequences: $x$ dominates $y$ if any impatient agent prefers $x$ to $y$. With this in hand, we define a notion of comparative patience. Alice is more patient than Bob if Alice's normalized discounted utility gain by going from any $y$ to any dominating $x$ is less than Bob's discounted utility gain from such an improvement. We provide a full characterization of this relation in terms of the agents' discount rules.

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Mark Whitmeyer. 2024-07-02. Comparative Patience. https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.02323

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