Dynamic public good provision under time preference heterogeneity
Philip Trammell (Global Priorities Institute and Department of Economics, University of Oxford)
GPI Working Paper No. 9-2021
I explore the implications of time preference heterogeneity for the private funding of public goods. The assumption that players use a common discount rate is knife-edge: relaxing it yields substantially different equilibria, for two reasons. First, time preference heterogeneity motivates intertemporal polarization, analogous to the polarization seen in a static public good game. In the simplest settings, more patient players spend nothing early in time and less patient players spending nothing later. Second, and consequently, time preference heterogeneity gives less patient players a “first-mover advantage”. Departures from the common-discounting assumption are economically significant: a patient player’s payoff in equilibrium, relative to that obtained when he is constrained to act according to a higher discount rate, typically grows unboundedly as his share of the initial budget falls to zero. Finally I discuss applications of these results to the debate over legal disbursement minima.
Other working papers
Tiny probabilities and the value of the far future – Petra Kosonen (Population Wellbeing Initiative, University of Texas at Austin)
Morally speaking, what matters the most is the far future – at least according to Longtermism. The reason why the far future is of utmost importance is that our acts’ expected influence on the value of the world is mainly determined by their consequences in the far future. The case for Longtermism is straightforward: Given the enormous number of people who might exist in the far future, even a tiny probability of affecting how the far future goes outweighs the importance of our acts’ consequences…
In search of a biological crux for AI consciousness – Bradford Saad (Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford)
Whether AI systems could be conscious is often thought to turn on whether consciousness is closely linked to biology. The rough thought is that if consciousness is closely linked to biology, then AI consciousness is impossible, and if consciousness is not closely linked to biology, then AI consciousness is possible—or, at any rate, it’s more likely to be possible. A clearer specification of the kind of link between consciousness and biology that is crucial for the possibility of AI consciousness would help organize inquiry into…
Ethical Consumerism – Philip Trammell (Global Priorities Institute and Department of Economics, University of Oxford)
I study a static production economy in which consumers have not only preferences over their own consumption but also external, or “ethical”, preferences over the supply of each good. Though existing work on the implications of external preferences assumes price-taking, I show that ethical consumers generically prefer not to act even approximately as price-takers. I therefore introduce a near-Nash equilibrium concept that generalizes the near-Nash equilibria found in literature on strategic foundations of general equilibrium…