The paper studies bargaining games involving players with present-biased preferences. The paper shows that the relative timing of bargaining rewards and bargaining costs will determine whether the players' present-bias will affect bargaining outcomes. In cases where players agree to a bargain in...

This paper develops a simple model of corporate governance based on the concept of time-inconsistent misconduct. The model relaxes the standard rational choice assumption that corporate actors have time-consistent preferences and thus have perfect self-control; it therefore directly accounts for...

There is a large literature in behavioral economics finding that people routinely override their long-term preferences due to the pull of immediate gratification. With this in mind, this paper develops a simple model of repeated procrastination that can be used to examine the efficacy of legal...

This article shows that the behavior of perfectly rational financial actors can cause financial meltdowns like the ones that occurred in 2007 and 2008. It analyzes the nature of informational asymmetries and group pathologies common in financial transactions and the role of intermediaries and...

The paper studies bargaining games involving players with present-biased preferences. The paper shows that the relative timing of bargaining rewards and bargaining costs will determine whether the players’ present-bias will affect bargaining outcomes. In cases where players agree to a bargain...

Many forms of consumption tax, including recent proposals to impose a tax on the use of carbon, impose disproportionate burdens on the poor. Commentators who propose mitigating this impact with tax rebates for low-income families have overlooked the importance of the timing of consumption for...

This article develops a model of time-inconsistent criminal misconduct. It shows that people who from a long-term perspective want to be law-abiding may nonetheless engage in repeated misconduct due to the pull of their short-term preferences for immediate gratification. I demonstrate that the...

This paper argues that the observed misconduct of managers and gatekeepers in the recent corporate scandals is better explained if one accounts for the time-inconsistent preferences of corporate actors. It builds on of my model of time-inconsistent misconduct, which I develop more fully...