Related papers: Awareness of self-control
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…
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…
This paper brings together divergent approaches to time inconsistency from macroeconomic policy and behavioural economics. Behavioural discount functions from behavioural microeconomics are embedded into a game-theoretic analysis of…
Many incentive design problems must contend with information asymmetries due to non-observation of efficiency (adverse selection) or non-observation of effort (moral hazard). And although a growing body of literature considers incentive…
The tendency to overestimate immediate utility is a common cognitive bias. As a result people behave inconsistently over time and fail to reach long-term goals. Behavioral economics tries to help affected individuals by implementing…
This paper empirically analyzes how individual characteristics are associated with risk aversion, loss aversion, time discounting, and present bias. To this end, we conduct a large-scale demographically representative survey across eight…
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…
This paper presents a semi-quantitative mathematical model of the changes over time in the statistical distribution of well-being of individuals in a society. The model predicts that when individuals overvalue the more socially conspicuous…
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…
We revisit the role of instrumental value as a driver of adaptive behavior. In active inference, instrumental or extrinsic value is quantified by the information-theoretic surprisal of a set of observations measuring the extent to which…
To choose between two discrete goods, a consumer pays attention to only those with prices below a threshold. From these, she chooses her most preferred good. We assume consumers in a population have the same preference but may have…
Central to privacy concerns is that firms may use consumer data to price discriminate. A common policy response is that consumers should be given control over which firms access their data and how. Since firms learn about a consumer's…
The goal of this article is to investigate how human participants allocate their limited time to decisions with different properties. We report the results of two behavioral experiments. In each trial of the experiments, the participant…
This paper considers time-inconsistent problems when control and stopping strategies are required to be made simultaneously (called stopping control problems by us). We first formulate the timeinconsistent stopping control problems under…
Timing decisions are common: when to file your taxes, finish a referee report, or complete a task at work. We ask whether time preferences can be inferred when \textsl{only} task completion is observed. To answer this question, we analyze…
Human behavioural patterns exhibit selfish or competitive, as well as selfless or altruistic tendencies, both of which have demonstrable effects on human social and economic activity. In behavioural economics, such effects have…
Dynamic decisions are pivotal to economic policy making. We show how existing evidence from randomized control trials can be utilized to guide personalized decisions in challenging dynamic environments with budget and capacity constraints.…
We exhibit optimal control strategies for a simple toy problem in which the underlying dynamics depend on a parameter that is initially unknown and must be learned. We consider a cost function posed over a finite time interval, in contrast…
A growing body of evidence has shown that incorporating behavioral economics principles into the design of financial incentive programs helps improve their cost-effectiveness, promote individuals' short-term engagement, and increase…
This paper considers the portfolio management problem of optimal investment, consumption and life insurance. We are concerned with time inconsistency of optimal strategies. Natural assumptions, like different discount rates for consumption…