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From the discussion in the article (especially the coin flipping example) it just sounds like distinguishing expected utility from expected value. This is a con

• pizza 6y ago
  Classical economics treats expected utility as ergodic but it's not, basically.
• sn41 6y ago
  I know some ergodic theory, but am not an economist. I cannot verify the veracity of the argument, but the argument itself is new, and not reducible to distinguishing between expected utility and expected value. My comment is based on a Nature article by the author [1]. This is just based on a first reading, so my understanding may not be spot on. The observation here is that the utility function in classical economics is not time-dependent. Time dependence is added-on by effects such as discounting. Discounting function itself may be personal - some investors are in a hurry, some are patient, this is usually taken into account. In contrast, the authors introduce stochastic noise into the __rate of growth of the loss function___ (not the expected wealth). [Equation 7 in the Nature paper]. This makes the evolution of the growth rate function into a Brownian motion. The authors claim that this models individual wealth trajectories better. This is as far as I have got. The underlying dynamical equations for the growth function are different, and the authors' claim is that their model predicts individual trajectories better than classical economics, and does not have to use psychology like behavioral economics. [1]https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-019-0732-0 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41567-019-0732-0