Agent seeks to maximize his/her lifetime (discounted) utility across all possible (infinite) state sequence outcomes, where each sequence has probability of occuring, given an initial state .
The agent's problem is as follows
subject to the lifetime budget constraint
where is the price of 1 unit of consumption (i.e. of a security that pays 1 unit of consumption in given sequence occurred) in terms of consumption; is agent 's consumption in time given sequence occurred; and is income.
Using Lagrande multipliers, we obtain the first order condition
Nothing that we obtain and our optimality condition becomes
which are the time-zero prices (in terms of consumption) of securities that pay one unit of consumption.
SUBSECTION
Market clearing conditions
SUBSECTION
Am important implication of this model is that if all agents have the same constant relative risk aversion (CRRA) utility function, of the form , then only aggregate income matters in determining securities prices. The outline of the proof is as follows:
From the first order conditions we have
and thus aggregate income matters in determining securities prices.
Let <math>u(c)=ln(c)