The objective of this paper is to determine the socially optimal discount rate for public investment projects that entail costs and benefits in the very long run. We suppose that there is an exogenous process for the growth of consumption per capita, which is stochastic. We first evaluate the determinants of the discount rate for a specific horizon when the representative agent has a recursive ...

In recent years, work has been done to develop the theory of General Reinforcement Learning (GRL). However, there are no examples demonstrating the known results regarding generalised discounting. We have added to the GRL simulation platform (AIXIjs) the functionality to assign an agent arbitrary discount functions, and an environment which can be used to determine the effect of discounting on ...

This paper explores the circumstances under which extremely discounted usability engineering techniques produce results that are worthwhile to researchers and practitioners. We present a method for usability analysis where an entire evaluation can be conducted in only thirty minutes, an amount of time we suggest as perhaps the smallest possible unit of analysis (or quantum) for complete usabili...

The valuation process that economic agents undergo for investments with uncertain payoff typically depends on their statistical views on possible future outcomes, their attitudes toward risk, and, of course, the payoff structure itself. Yields vary across different investment opportunities and their interrelations are difficult to explain. For the same agent, a different discounting factor has ...

Background: Discounting Approaches Discounting is generally defined as the process of comparing the values of costs and benefits that occur at different times. Approaches to choosing discount rates are generally placed into two categories. The descriptive approach matches discount rates to descriptions of how society discounts taken from monetary interest rates observed in financial markets. Th...

de Kok et al. (1) recently reported the cost-effectiveness of human papillomavirus vaccination in the netherlands and argued that human papillomavirus vaccination is not a cost-effective preventive measure in the netherlands. They calculated a discounted (annual rate 3%) incremental cost-effectiveness ratio (IcER) of €53 500 per qualityadjusted life-year (Qaly), which is clearly higher than the...

Intertemporal preferences are di¢ cult to measure. We estimate time preferences using a structural bu¤er stock consumption model and the Method of Simulated Moments. The model includes stochastic labor income, liquidity constraints, child and adult dependents, liquid and illiquid assets, revolving credit, retirement, and discount functions that allow short-run and longrun discount rates to di¤e...