Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/208092 
Year of Publication: 
2019
Series/Report no.: 
Discussion Paper No. 192
Publisher: 
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München und Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Collaborative Research Center Transregio 190 - Rationality and Competition, München und Berlin
Abstract: 
We study a model of task completion with the opportunity to learn about own self-control problems over time. While the agent is initially uncertain about her future self-control, in each period she can choose to learn about it by paying a non-negative learning cost and spending one period. If the agent has time-consistent preferences, she always chooses to learn whenever the learning is beneficial. If the agent has time-inconsistent preferences, however, she may procrastinate such a learning opportunity. Further, if her time preferences exhibit inter-temporal conflicts between future selves (e.g., hyperbolic discounting), the procrastination of learning can occur even when the learning cost is zero. The procrastination also leads to a non-completion of the task. When the agent has multiple initially-uncertain attributes (e.g., own future self-control and own ability for the task), the agent's endogenous learning decisions may be misdirected - she chooses to learn what she should not learn from her initial perspective, and she chooses not to learn what she should.
Subjects: 
procrastination
self-control
naivete
hyperbolic discounting
misdirected learning
JEL: 
C70
D83
D90
D91
Document Type: 
Working Paper

Files in This Item:
File
Size
490.03 kB





Items in EconStor are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated.