Impatience and accumulation (Q793634)

In studying the concept of impatience Koopmans was led to a useful class of preference orderings which generalizes the familiar class of additively separable preferences. The aggregator preference orderings exhibit a richer variety of behaviour for the various concepts of impatience that can be associated with preference orderings among commodity sequences over time and provide a formal framework for the analysis of impatience. Beals and Koopmans studied the paths of capital accumulation that arise from such preference orderings in an economy with a single (capital) good, a simple recursive technology set and a single representative consumer. They showed that if the rate of impatience decreases whenever consumption in the first period is increased then the optimal path of capital accumulation has a simple asymptotic behaviour - it converges to a steady state that depends only on the rate of return associated with the constant path from the given initial condition. The objective of the paper is to provide an extension of this earlier analysis.