Patience Levels Research Articles

Self-Enforcing Trade Agreements, Dispute Settlement and Separation of Powers

In an environment where international trade agreements must be enforced via promises of future cooperation, the presence of an import-competing lobby has important implications for optimal punishments, and therefore dispute resolution procedures. When lobbies work to disrupt trade agreements, the optimal punishment must balance two, conflicting objectives. Longer punishments help to enforce cooperation by increasing the government's costs of defecting, but because the lobby prefers the punishment outcome, this also incentivizes lobbying effort and with it political pressure to break the agreement. Thus the model generates new predictions for the design of mechanisms for resolving trade disputes: within the class of Nash-reversion punishments, there is an optimal length for dispute resolutions procedures, and it depends directly on the political influence of the lobbies. Trade agreement tariffs are shown to be increasing in the political influence of the lobbies, as well as their patience levels.

Using Estimated Patience Levels to Optimally Schedule Customers

Customer impatience has become an integral component of analyzing services, especially in the context of call centers. Typically, when customers arrive to such systems, they seem identical or homogeneous, however, from the system's perspective, as they wait in the queue, their residual willingness to wait changes. For instance, a customer who has already waited for 10 minutes may have a different residual willingness to wait as compared with a customer who has only waited for 1 minute. In this manner, as time progresses, customers become differentiated on their estimated patience levels. We exploit this dimension of customer heterogeneity to construct scheduling policies in overloaded systems that dynamically prioritize customers based on their time in queue in order to optimize any given system performance metric. Interestingly, the optimal policy has a very simple structure, and we find that implementing it can lead to significant improvements over the first come first serve policy.

The Evolution of Cooperation: How Patience Matters

The evolution of cooperation has been the focus of much attention from evolutionary game theorists. Of course, conventional game theorists often cite the Folk Theorem to suggest that cooperation is very likely as long as people are patient. However, experimental and real world evidence of the Folk Theorem has been sparse. We investigate whether cooperation can evolve endogenously in a population where people have different patience levels. We motivate our model by asking the following question: why don’t biologists cooperate with each other by contributing to biological databases? We apply the Folk theorem from conventional game theory and assume that patient people cooperate while impatient people do not. Further, we allow people to be heterogenous in the patience trait. We then show, using evolutionary game theory, how patience may matter in the evolution of cooperation. Computer simulations check for the robustness of our results. We suggest therefore that experimental evidence for the Folk theorem has been scarce because these experiments ignore patience endogeneity.

In This Issue

In This Issue

Credit and inflation under borrowerʼs lack of commitment

Here we investigate the existence of credit in a cash-in-advance economy where there are complete markets but for the fact that agents cannot commit to repay their debts. Defectors are banned from the credit market but they can use money balances for saving purposes. Without uncertainty, deflation crowds out credit completely. The equilibrium allocation, however, is efficient if the government deflates at the time preference rate. Efficiency can also be restored with positive inflation. For any non negative inflation rate below the optimal level, the volume of credit and the real interest rate increase with inflation. Our results hold when idiosyncratic uncertainty is introduced and households are sufficiently impatient but in one instance: efficiency cannot be restored if the deflation rate is nearby the rate of time preference. Our numerical examples suggest that the optimal inflation rate is not too large for reasonable levels of patience and risk aversion. Finally, we present a framework where the use of money arises endogenously and show that it is tantamount to our cash-in-advance framework. Our results hold in this modified environment.

A noncooperative marriage model with remarriage

I propose a noncooperative marriage model that explicitly accommodates the possibility of endogenous exit and remarriage, and where marriages are of variable quality. The fundamental innovation is that the remarriage decision is infinitely repeated and the problem is fully stationary, reflecting the contemporary reality in marriage markets. I show that cooperative behavior within marriage is possible in subgame perfect equilibrium both in a setting where marriage quality is independently drawn and in a setting with persistent spouse-specific characteristics and an evolving marriage market quality. I show that spouses engage in cooperative behavior most easily when they have intermediate patience levels, which is a non-standard but intuitive game theoretic result in this setting. This model also contributes to the game theory literature by proposing another avenue for sustained cooperation in a repeated prisoner’s dilemma with endogenous exit: randomness in payoff streams.

Search, Failure, and the Value of Moderate Patience

Conventional wisdom suggests that successful innovation in complex and novel environments requires patience – persistence despite failures – to ensure broad search for good solutions. Using an agent-based simulation model, I show that the link between patience and innovation is complex: Moderate levels of patience promote broad and effective search. High levels of patience, in contrast, can have unintended effects and even decrease performance despite increasing the degree of search. Furthermore, because translating the gains of patience into performance improvements requires time, low levels of patience are generally optimal for shorter time frames. My findings indicate that paying attention to how patience affects both the explorative and exploitative aspects of search can show when patience may effectively boost innovation.

Was Sinn Féin Dying? A Quantitative Post‐Mortem of the Party's Decline and the Emergence of Fianna Fáil

This article calls for a reappraisal of the consensus surrounding the split within Sinn Féin in 1926 that led to the foundation of Fianna Fáil. It demonstrates that quantitative factors cited to show Sinn Féin's ‘terminal’ decline – finances, cumann (branch) numbers, and election results – and to explain de Valera's decision to leave Sinn Féin and establish a rival republican organisation, Fianna Fáil, do not provide sufficient objective grounds to explain the republican leader's actions. The article demonstrates that Sinn Féin's election results during the period in question (1923–26) were encouraging and the decline in finances and cumann numbers can be explained by the fact that the base year used to compare progress was 1923, an election year. Moreover, the article compares the performance of Sinn Féin to the first five years of Fianna Fáil (1926–31) to show that what has been interpreted as terminal decline can also be attributed to normal inter‐election lulls in party activity. Correspondingly, subjective factors – e.g. personal rivalries, differences in ideology, organisational style and levels of patience in terms of achieving political power – were most likely the determining factors rather than organisational decline.

Individual decision-making experiments with risk and intertemporal choice

Many decisions require tradeoffs over time and in the presence of risk. To examine interactions between risk and intertemporal effects we developed a laboratory experiment. In the experiment, subjects choose between payoffs that take place at different points in time. We find that very few subjects are consistently risk averse or risk loving. Instead, we find that subjects are less patient in the presence of risk. We also find that increased risk decreases subjects’ patience levels. However, we do not find evidence that the effect of risk on the intertemporal decision depends on the length of the temporal delay.

A Discussion of Marc Miller's “Straight, Gay or Both”

ABSTRACT Relational and intersubjective schools of psychoanalysis have been impressive in developing and maintaining high levels of patience and tact in their dealings with people who are homosexual. Nevertheless, a certain tentativeness about premature and tactless probing has also developed, which can serve as a disguise for serious therapeutic limitations and, unless attended to, can seriously derail or retard progress in analytic treatment. The case presented in Marc Miller's “Straight, Gay or Both,” of an analyst treating a homosexual or bisexual patient, serves to illustrate both the strengths and limitations of many contemporary “relational” treatments. Particular attention is directed to the ways that defensiveness against the analyst's experiences of homosexual impulses, disguised as undue concern for tact, can needlessly prolong the length of treatment, exacerbate the patient's dependency needs, and deepen his depressive reactions.

Patience

Patience

The Evolutionary Origins of Human Patience: Temporal Preferences in Chimpanzees, Bonobos, and Human Adults

To make adaptive choices, individuals must sometimes exhibit patience, forgoing immediate benefits to acquire more valuable future rewards [1-3]. Although humans account for future consequences when making temporal decisions [4], many animal species wait only a few seconds for delayed benefits [5-10]. Current research thus suggests a phylogenetic gap between patient humans and impulsive, present-oriented animals [9, 11], a distinction with implications for our understanding of economic decision making [12] and the origins of human cooperation [13]. On the basis of a series of experimental results, we reject this conclusion. First, bonobos (Pan paniscus) and chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) exhibit a degree of patience not seen in other animals tested thus far. Second, humans are less willing to wait for food rewards than are chimpanzees. Third, humans are more willing to wait for monetary rewards than for food, and show the highest degree of patience only in response to decisions about money involving low opportunity costs. These findings suggest that core components of the capacity for future-oriented decisions evolved before the human lineage diverged from apes. Moreover, the different levels of patience that humans exhibit might be driven by fundamental differences in the mechanisms representing biological versus abstract rewards.

Physical Therapy: Stories That Must Be Told

I love a good story. Everyone does. Not all of us like the same stories, and we all have different levels of patience for certain storytellers; however, we can agree that we all like some kind of story. We enjoy reading or hearing a story and its plot. We like vicariously experiencing how the situations are handled or the challenges faced unfold. Good stories contain complex situations and challenges. Good stories reflect life and the reality that life is not a clear-cut endeavor; it is, rather, an adventure. Imagine reading an excerpt from each of the many individual stories you could tell because of your various experiences in the profession of physical therapy. Some of our stories may draw a tear. Others can encourage a smile. Like the story that a colleague told me [Figure] about a young high school student. This young man was in an unfortunate accident where he was hit by a car and incurred a fractured femur, a dislocation of his contralateral knee, and many other assorted soft tissue injuries. This 6′8″ patient was brought into the clinic in a wheelchair, and the 5′3″ physical therapist and a physical therapist assistant transferred him to a plinth, far too short for his frame, to begin her examination. The physical therapist wanted to initiate a rapport with this young man. Now, you can imagine this: here is a young man draped off the long ends of a plinth, uncomfortable and with an almost comatose level of interest in any kind of rapport. The physical therapist asked, “Are you a basketball player?” The 6′8″ kid opened his heretofore closed eyes and without hesitation said to the 5′3″ physical therapist, “No, are you a jockey?” Our stories are as good as they get; they draw out all kinds …

Optimal money growth in a limited participation model with heterogeneous agents

This paper studies optimal money growth in a cash-in-advance production economy with heterogeneity in patience levels and know-how. We show that the rate of deflation suggested by the Friedman rule is limited by the subjective discount rate of the most patient agent in the economy. The output distortion due to cash-in-advance constraints on firms can completely be eliminated by means of the Friedman rule if and only if firms are run by the most patient agents.

Performance analysis of an inbound call center with skills-based routing

Many call centers provide service for customers of different classes with differently qualified groups of agents. Since call arrivals and call handling times are random in inbound call centers, we investigate queueing models for their performance analysis. This paper describes a Markov queueing model with two customer classes and three groups of specialized or flexible agents. The mean call handling time may depend on the respective customer class as well as on the agent group serving this call. The customers are assumed to be impatient. We consider skills-based routing with priority-based rules and derive both steady-state probabilities and performance measures. We present some numerical experiments and show the impact of different mean processing times. The influence of the allocation of the agents into the three groups is analyzed for different levels of patience.