Schelling talks about in Choice and Consequences about how traditional economics applies a discount rate, but how that fails to explanation many situations. Schelling writes, “[The person who] furiously scratches …”
I think you accidentally deleted something in the midst of editing, because this paragraph comes out of nowhere. Discount rate for what? Scratching? You hint at the context in the next paragraph but unless I missed it you don’t actually explain anywhere the example that you’re referencing.
Also, your didn’t work. :)
The actual content is interesting, though. It’s trying to remind me of something else I read recently but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
I think you accidentally deleted something in the midst of editing, because this paragraph comes out of nowhere. Discount rate for what? Scratching?
It seems to be missing something, yes. I understood it refers to scratching an itchy rash and thereby making the rash worse, and likely to itch worse in the future. Before the rash context later on, I thought it might refer to scratch card lottery as well.
The economic model is that your utility function (over world histories) is the integral over all time of a quantity that depends only on the instantaneous state of the world times a quantity that depends only on the time index. Typically this latter quantity is of the form e^(-kt), and k is called the discount rate.
I think you accidentally deleted something in the midst of editing, because this paragraph comes out of nowhere. Discount rate for what? Scratching? You hint at the context in the next paragraph but unless I missed it you don’t actually explain anywhere the example that you’re referencing.
Also, your didn’t work. :)
The actual content is interesting, though. It’s trying to remind me of something else I read recently but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
It seems to be missing something, yes. I understood it refers to scratching an itchy rash and thereby making the rash worse, and likely to itch worse in the future. Before the rash context later on, I thought it might refer to scratch card lottery as well.
The economic model is that your utility function (over world histories) is the integral over all time of a quantity that depends only on the instantaneous state of the world times a quantity that depends only on the time index. Typically this latter quantity is of the form e^(-kt), and k is called the discount rate.