Equilibrium Welfare and Government Policy with Quasi-geometric Discounting

We consider a representative-agent equilibrium model where the consumer has quasi-geometric discounting and cannot commit to future actions. We restrict attention to a parametric class for preferences and technology and solve for time-consistent competitive equilibria globally and explicitly. We then characterize the welfare properties of competitive equilibria and compare them to that of a planning problem. The planner is a consumer representative who, without commitment but in a time-consistent way, maximizes his present-value utility subject to resource constraints. The competitive equilibrium results in strictly higher welfare than does the planning problem whenever the discounting is not geometric. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: E21, E61, E91.