COWLES FOUNDATION FOR RESEARCH IN ECONOMICS
AT YALE UNIVERSITY

Box 208281
New Haven, CT 06520-8281

COWLES FOUNDATION DISCUSSION PAPER NO. 481

"Myopic Economic Agents"

Donald J. Brown and Lucinda M. Lewis

1978

An economic agent is said to be weakly myopic if he prefers a time-contingent consumption plan x bar to a time-contingent consumption plan y bar, then he prefers x bar x to y bar augmented by any stationary consumption plan which begins sufficiently far in the future.

An economic agent is said to be monotonically myopic if when he prefers a state-contingent consumption plan x bar to a state-contingent consumption plan y bar, then he prefers any sufficiently large finite truncation of y bar.

A topology on the space of time (state)-contingent consumption plans is said to be weakly (monotonically) myopic if every complete preference relation which is continuous in this topology is weakly (monotonically) myopic.

A characterization of weakly (monotonically) myopic Hausdorff locally convex linear topologies and their dual spaces is given.

See CFP 525