Time-Stochastic Dominance and iso-elastic discounted utility functions.

Summary Dietz and Matei (2015) introduce Time-Stochastic Dominance and apply it to evaluate climate-change mitigation. They compute several preferences classes for which mitigation policies are preferred to business-as-usual. The purpose of the present study is to investigate which standard utility functions (with constant time-discount rate and a constant risk aversion) belong to them. The major contribution is to map preferences classes studied by Dietz and Matei (2015) into the space of time-discount rate and elasticity of marginal utility of consumption, space in which the climate debate has been shaped so far.