Authors: Pascal Stiefenhofer ¹; Cristina Neesham ^1,2

• 1 Newcastle University Business School
• 2 Swinburne University of Technology [Melbourne]

Standard economic theory treats time as an exogenous, linear parameter that indexes choice and coordination. This paper argues that such treatment obscures a constitutive feature of rational agency. We develop a coherence-based framework in which the temporal structure relevant to rational choice is generated endogenously from evaluative admissibility rather than presupposed.Agency is modelled as smooth trajectories on a value-laden state space, with rationality defined in terms of locally coherent continuation rather than global optimisation. An evaluative potential induces a cone field on the tangent bundle, specifying at each state the directions of admissible continuation along which evaluative value does not locally decrease. Rational action is thus represented as cone-admissible motion through an evaluative geometry, not as the selection of optimal outcomes. Within this framework, agent-relative time is induced by evaluative progression along admissible trajectories. Both temporal ordering and temporal rate depend on the geometry of value-realising motion, even when evaluative structure and feasibility constraints are held fixed. Objective time remains available for coordination and measurement, but it plays no independent explanatory role in accounting for rational agency.An illustrative continuous-time economic-moral choice model shows how path dependence, rational disagreement, and moral compromise arise from the topology of admissible trajectories themselves, without appeal to preference change, stochastic disturbance, or optimisation failure. The framework provides a formally precise alternative to maximisation-centred accounts of rational agency and identifies a form of irreducibly temporal uncertainty that standard decision-theoretic models cannot represent.