Economic Theory and Experimental Seminar - Marie-Louise Vierø (Queen's University)

Title: An intertemporal model of growing awareness

Abstract: This paper presents an intertemporal model of growing awareness. It provides a framework for analyzing problems with long time horizons in the presence of growing awareness and awareness of unawareness. The framework generalizes both the standard event-tree framework and the framework from Karni and Vierø (2017) of awareness of unawareness. Axioms and a representation are provided along with a recursive formulation of intertemporal utility. This allows for tractable and consistent analysis of intertemporal problems with unawareness. To illustrate the relevance of growing awareness for dynamic decision making, the model is applied to a representative agent intertemporal asset pricing problem.