eScholarship provides open access, scholarly publishing services to the University of California and delivers a dynamic research platform to scholars worldwide. Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, UCB UC Berkeley Title: Numerical Analysis of Non-Constant Discounting with an Application to Renewable Resource Management Author: Fujii, Tomoki , Singapore Management University Karp, Larry , University of California, Berkeley and Giannini Foundation Publication Date: 05-31-2006 Publication Info: Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics, UCB, UC Berkeley Permalink: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/74q473v8 Keywords: Non-constant discounting, numerical methods, non-renewable resources, observational equivalence. Abstract: The possibility of non-constant discounting is important in environmental and resource management problems where current decisions affect welfare in the far-distant future, as with climate change. The difficulty of analyzing models with non-constant discounting limits their application. We describe and provide software to implement an algorithm to numerically obtain a Markov Perfect Equilibrium for an optimal control problem with non-constant discounting. The software is available online. We illustrate the approach by studying welfare and observational equivalence for a particular renewable resource management problem.