Alexander Mahr · 1967
This single-author theoretical article analyzes intertemporal consumer choice: present consumption, future provision, saving, interest, marginal utility, and rationality under scarcity and uncertainty. Mahr begins by clarifying needs, utility, goals, and economic disposition, because consumer theory often treats these terms too abstractly. Utility is not mere pleasure but expected satisfaction from realizing an aim, including duty, prudence, or avoidance of harm. The article’s guiding criticism is that received theory wrongly seeks one general law for the relation between present and future consumption.
Die bisherige Theorie hat das Problem: Gegenwart und Zukunft in den Dispositionen der Verbraucher, im ganzen recht unbefriedigend behandelt.
English translation: Theory hitherto has, on the whole, dealt quite unsatisfactorily with the problem of present and future in the dispositions of consumers.
Mahr’s main contribution is typological. Consumers do not simply choose between “today’s consumption” and “tomorrow’s consumption” of the same good. They face recurring subsistence needs, postponable wishes, durable-goods purchases, future-only aims, precautionary reserves, and accumulation motives. This weakens abstinence theory: present restraint is usually not undertaken because the same need will be more intensely satisfied later, but because a different future project is valued.
Die Regel ist, daß Einschränkungen an der gegenwärtigen Bedürfnisbefriedigung nur vorgenommen werden, um in der Zukunft neue, anders geartete Bedürfnisse befriedigen zu können.
English translation: The rule is that restrictions on present want-satisfaction are undertaken only in order to be able to satisfy new, differently constituted wants in the future.
Against Böhm-Bawerk, Mahr accepts only a limited tendency to prefer earlier satisfaction. For trips, household appliances, cars, or homes, earlier realization is usually preferred, other things equal. Yet he rejects the idea that this follows chiefly from bad foresight, moral weakness, or mortality. His explanation is psychological: a nearer future satisfaction already affects present motivation more strongly through anticipation.
Der Hauptgrund ist vielmehr darin zu suchen, daß die gegenwartsnähere Befriedigung eine intensivere Vorfreude auslöst und dadurch bei den in der Gegenwart zu treffenden Dispositionen eine stärkere Motivationskraft ausübt als die zeitlich entferntere Befriedigung.
English translation: The principal reason is rather to be sought in the fact that satisfaction nearer to the present evokes a more intense anticipatory pleasure and thereby, in the dispositions to be made in the present, exerts a stronger motivational force than satisfaction more remote in time.
This point also separates time preference from interest theory. If a consumer wants a journey or durable good, ordinary interest rates are rarely enough to induce postponement merely for a larger later sum. Only exceptional gains or very high rates would regularly compensate for delay. Interest therefore cannot be explained by a universal discounting of future wants; at most, such discounting explains special cases such as improvident borrowing.
Mahr’s discussion of saving is equally differentiated. When saving serves a fixed future aim, a higher interest rate can reduce the required present sacrifice, while a lower rate may force higher saving, reduced aims, or abandonment. Precautionary reserves persist even with insurance, though their scale changes. Accumulation may express entrepreneurial plans, independence, prestige, or hoarding. Thus aggregate saving depends on income, social institutions, and motive-structure more than on interest alone.
He also criticizes the mathematical doctrine that rational consumers equalize weighted marginal utilities over time. Even present consumption is shaped by convention, advertising, prestige, impulse, and status-related additional utility; future calculation is still less exact. Consumers compare broad groups of needs, not every marginal unit across all future periods. Rational allocation is therefore practical, approximate, and revisable.
The final section distinguishes short-term from long-term rationality. Short-term rationality orders spending within the current income period; long-term rationality also considers foreseeable future needs, risks, and income interruptions. But later outcomes cannot retrospectively prove earlier decisions irrational, since accident, illness, inflation, war, rent policy, or political change may overturn reasonable plans.
Vom in der Zukunft gelegenen Ergebnis her kann eine wirtschaftliche Entscheidung, wie gezeigt, nicht beurteilt werden, sondern nur unter dem Gesichtswinkel der im Zeitpunkt der Entscheidung erkennbaren Entwicklungstendenzen.
English translation: An economic decision cannot, as has been shown, be judged from the standpoint of the outcome lying in the future, but only from the standpoint of the developmental tendencies discernible at the moment of decision.
Mahr’s importance lies in retaining marginalist concepts while limiting their abstraction. Needs, utility, saving, marginal utility, and rationality remain central, but they become temporal, psychological, and institutional. Intertemporal consumer behavior cannot be derived from a single preference for the present or from the interest rate; it requires attention to need-types, anticipation, income constraints, insurance, prestige, and uncertainty.
This work was divided into 6 sections when it entered the library's research corpus—an apparatus for search and citation, not necessarily the author's own table of contents. Each title opens its summary.
Put a question to this work; the Librarian answers from its 6 sections and cites the passage.
Ask the Librarian