Related papers: Identifying Present-Bias from the Timing of Choice…
Time-inconsistency is a characteristic of human behavior in which people plan for long-term benefits but take actions that differ from the plan due to conflicts with short-term benefits. Such time-inconsistent behavior is believed to be…
Is an option especially tempting when it is both immediate and certain? I test the effect of risk on the present-bias factor given quasi-hyperbolic discounting. In my experiment workers allocate about thirty to fifty minutes of real-effort…
Humans exhibit time-inconsistent behavior, in which planned actions diverge from executed actions. Understanding time inconsistency and designing appropriate interventions is a key research challenge in computer science and behavioral…
Present bias, the tendency to overvalue immediate rewards while undervaluing future ones, is a well-known barrier to achieving long-term goals. As artificial intelligence and behavioral economics increasingly focus on this phenomenon, the…
We introduce an infinite-horizon, continuous-time portfolio selection problem faced by an agent with periodic S-shaped preference and present bias. The inclusion of a quasi-hyperbolic discount function leads to time-inconsistency and we…
We build upon recent work [Kleinberg and Oren, 2014, Kleinberg et al., 2016, 2017] that considers present biased agents, who place more weight on costs they must incur now than costs they will incur in the future. They consider a graph…
Individuals working towards a goal often exhibit time inconsistent behavior, making plans and then failing to follow through. One well-known model of such behavioral anomalies is present-bias discounting: individuals over-weight present…
I model a rational agent who experiences endogenous deadline pressure in the face of a fixed future deadline. The agent holds a resource stock, and opportunities to spend resources arise randomly according to a Poisson process. When the…
For optimal stopping problems with time-inconsistent preference, we measure the inherent level of time-inconsistency by taking the time needed to turn the naive strategies into the sophisticated ones. In particular, when in a repeated…
We model the joint distribution of choice probabilities and decision times in binary choice tasks as the solution to a problem of optimal sequential sampling, where the agent is uncertain of the utility of each action and pays a constant…
Time-inconsistent preferences, where agents favor smaller-sooner over larger-later rewards, are a key feature of human and animal decision-making. Quasi-Hyperbolic (QH) discounting provides a simple yet powerful model for this behavior, but…
An important use of machine learning is to learn what people value. What posts or photos should a user be shown? Which jobs or activities would a person find rewarding? In each case, observations of people's past choices can inform our…
A principal delegates decisions to a biased agent. Payoffs depend on a state that the principal cannot observe. Initially, the agent does not observe the state, but he can acquire information about it at a cost. We characterize the…
We consider a model where an agent has a repeated decision to make and wishes to maximize their total payoff. Payoffs are influenced by an action taken by the agent, but also an unknown state of the world that evolves over time. Before…
In economics and psychology, delay discounting is often used to characterize how individuals choose between a smaller immediate reward and a larger delayed reward. People with higher delay discounting rate (DDR) often choose smaller but…
Present bias, the tendency to weigh costs and benefits incurred in the present too heavily, is one of the most widespread human behavioral biases. It has also been the subject of extensive study in the behavioral economics literature. While…
A temporally abstract action, or an option, is specified by a policy and a termination condition: the policy guides option behavior, and the termination condition roughly determines its length. Generally, learning with longer options (like…
This paper examines the extent to which individual time preferences are associated with the willingness to accept different tax burdens. The first is an intertemporal redistribution in which a current consumption tax increase is exchanged…
The use of hypothetical instead of real decision-making incentives remains under debate after decades of economic experiments. Standard incentivized experiments involve substantial monetary costs due to participants' earnings and often…
In this paper, we consider the revealed preferences problem from a learning perspective. Every day, a price vector and a budget is drawn from an unknown distribution, and a rational agent buys his most preferred bundle according to some…