How is consumer patience modelled? My first thought was "discount factors, but the problem is that it doesn't seem to capture the intuitive notion of what being patient means.
For example, the following sounds very reasonable (see Coase Conjecture):
A monopolist selling a durable good loses market power if consumers become increasingly patient.
But if we model patience using discount factors, this result does not hold. For example, say consumer utility across two periods is $$U(c_1, c_2) = c_1 + \beta c_2$$ where $c_1, c_2$ is consumption in the two periods and $\beta$ is a discount factor. If $\beta = 1$, then the consumers are very patient, because they place equal value on the consumption in both periods.
However, that means that utility is $c_1 + c_2$. This is strictly greater than $c_1 + \beta c_2$ for $\beta < 1$. Therefore, the utility of the consumer is strictly higher across any level of consumption $\{(c_1, c_2) \in \mathbb{R}^2\}$.
Clearly that would mean that the firm gets more market power, because their consumer base is now strictly better off from buying their products than they were before.