A topological approach to delay aversion

A decision maker is to choose between two different amounts of money, with the smaller one available at an earlier period. Then she is long-term delay averse if she chooses the smaller and earlier extra amount whenever the bigger one is delivered sufficiently far in the future. In this paper we study new topologies on l∞ which “discount” the future consistently with the notion of long-term delay aversion. We compare these topologies with other topologies that have the property of representing impatient, or patient, preferences. Our results bear relevance on the theory of infinite-dimensional general equilibrium and with the works that consider bubbles as the pathological (not countably additive) part of a charge. Finally we develop a notion of more long-term delay aversion and we compare it with the concepts studied by Benoît and Ok (2007).