We repeatedly elicit beliefs about the returns to study effort, in a large university course. A behavioral model of quasi-hyperbolic discounting and malleable beliefs predicts that the dynamics of beliefs mirrors the importance of exerting self-control, such that believed returns increase as the...

Viewed through the lens of the prominent two-system model of decision making, behavioral economics is seen as studying the tension between impulses (System 1) and rationality (System 2). In this context, two strategies, "de-biasing" informing agents of their biases and "counter-biasing" using...

Consumers often exhibit behavioral cycles with alternating abstinence and indulgence over time. In the framework of tempting good consumption under limited willpower, we develop a simple model of the self-control cycles. To do so, based on the empirically relevant property of self-control, we...