Goals are an important source of motivation. But little is known about why and how people set them. We address these … questions in a model based on two stylized facts from psychology and behavioral economics: i) Goals serve as reference points … for performance. ii) Present-biased preferences create self-control problems. We show how goals permit self …

(broad bracketing). We study the hypothesis that a present-biased individual, who faces two tasks, may bracket his goals … narrowly for motivational reasons. Goals motivate because they serve as reference points that make substandard performance … partially insures against the risk of falling short of ones' goal(s), but creates incentives to shirk in one of the tasks …

We model how people formulate and evaluate goals to overcome self-control problems. People often attempt to regulate … from the literatures on goals and mental accounting with models of expectations-based reference-dependent preferences. By … formulating goals the individual creates expectations that induce reference points for task outcomes. These goal-induced reference …

We study in an online, real-effort experiment how the bracketing of non-binding goals affects performance in a work …-leisure self-control problem. We externally induce the goal bracket – daily goals or a weekly goal – and within that bracket let … subjects set goals for how much they want to work over a one-week period. Our theoretical model predicts (i) that weekly goals …

(broad bracketing). We study the hypothesis that a present-biased individual, who faces two tasks, may bracket his goals … narrowly for motivational reasons. Goals motivate because they serve as reference points that make substandard performance … partially insures against the risk of falling short of ones' goal(s), but creates incentives to shirk in one of the tasks …

We model how people formulate and evaluate goals to overcome self-control problems. People often attempt to regulate … from the literatures on goals and mental accounting with models of expectations-based reference-dependent preferences. By … formulating goals the individual creates expectations that induce reference points for task outcomes. These goal-induced reference …

Goals are an important source of motivation. But little is known about why and how people set them. We address these … questions in a model based on two stylized facts from psychology and behavioral economics: i) Goals serve as reference points … for performance. ii) Present-biased preferences create self-control problems. We show how goals permit self …