In this metaphor, are learning and knowing investments that will return future cash? Why should there be different discount rates?
By learning, I mean gaining knowledge. Humans can receive enjoyment both from having stuff and from gaining stuff, and knowledge is not an exception.
It’s true that a dynamically-consistent agent can’t have different discount rates for different terminal values, but bounded rationalists might talk about instrumental values using the same sort of math they use for terminal values. In that context it makes sense to use different discount rates for different sorts of good.
Writing the above comment got me thinking about agents having different discount rates for different sorts of goods. Could the appearance of hyperbolic discounting come from a mixture of different rates of exponential discounting?
I remembered that the same sort of question comes up in the study of radioisotope decay. A quick google search turned up this blog, which says that if you assume a maximum-entropy mixture of decay rates (constrained by a particular mean energy), you get hyperbolic decay of the mixture. This is exactly the answer I was looking for.
By learning, I mean gaining knowledge. Humans can receive enjoyment both from having stuff and from gaining stuff, and knowledge is not an exception.
It’s true that a dynamically-consistent agent can’t have different discount rates for different terminal values, but bounded rationalists might talk about instrumental values using the same sort of math they use for terminal values. In that context it makes sense to use different discount rates for different sorts of good.
Writing the above comment got me thinking about agents having different discount rates for different sorts of goods. Could the appearance of hyperbolic discounting come from a mixture of different rates of exponential discounting?
I remembered that the same sort of question comes up in the study of radioisotope decay. A quick google search turned up this blog, which says that if you assume a maximum-entropy mixture of decay rates (constrained by a particular mean energy), you get hyperbolic decay of the mixture. This is exactly the answer I was looking for.