This paper examines the relationship between self-control, financial literacy and over-indebtedness on consumer credit debt among UK consumers. Lack of self-control and financial illiteracy are positively associated with non-payment of consumer credit and self-reported excessive financial...

We model self-control conflict as an agent’s stochastic struggle against a visceral influence that impels the agent to act sub-optimally. The agent holds costly pre-commitment technology to avoid the conflict altogether and may decide whether to procure pre-commitment or to confront the...

Individuals in a social dilemma may experience a self-control conflict between urges to act selfishly and their better judgment to cooperate. Pairing a public goods game with a subtle framing technique, we test whether perception of self-control conflict strengthens the association between...

Most contemporary self-control theories share two core assumptions. They assume that indulgence is the default option in self-control decision situations, and that successful self-control requires top down interference, either in the form of willpower (direct top down interference) or in the...

This theoretical paper presents an incentive salience model of intertemporal choice. The model is a variation of the quasi-hyperbolic discounting model. Based on the distinction between ‘wanting’ and ‘liking’, the paper presents one possible explanation of impulsive choices of smaller...

I study the behavior of individuals with present biased preferences who are involved in costly, long-run projects. By using generic cost and reward functions, I characterize the behaviors of the sophisticated, partial naive and naive types. It is shown that there may arise cases where naives...

A recent literature emphasizes that gender differences in the labor market may in part be driven by a gender gap in willingness to compete. However, whereas experiments in this literature typically investigate willingness to compete in private environments, real world competitions often have a...

Many people judge that it is permissible to harm one person in order to save many in some circumstances but not in others: it matters how the harm comes about. Researchers have used trolley problems to investigate this phenomenon, eliciting moral judgments or behavioral predictions about...

No behavior sits in a vacuum, and one behavior can greatly affect what happens next. We propose a conceptual frame within which a broad range of behavioral spillovers can be accounted for when applying behavioral science to policy challenges. We consider behaviors which take place sequentially...

We investigate the effects of a range of different types of anchor on WTP and WTA valuations of familiar consumer products, elicited through individuals’ buying or selling decisions at given prices. We find anchoring effects only when the anchor value is framed as a plausible price for the...