Delay Functions as the Foundation of Time Preference: Testing for Separable Discounted Utility

We are grateful to Larry Epstein, Bart Lipman and Faruk Gul for very useful discussions, to Glenn Harrison and Daniel Schunk for detailed comments and discussions of the experimental literature. Helpful comments from seminar participants at Boston University, Caltech, Cornell, UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara, UC Irvine, Johns Hopkins, NYU, LSE and U of Glasgow and participants at the Canadian Economic Theory Conference (2010) and European Summer Symposium in Economic Theory (2010) are also gratefully acknowledged. The usual disclaimer applies. We acknowledge funding from Boston University. This paper subsumes an earlier paper circulated as "Time Preference: Experiments and Foundations". The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.