People underappreciate how their own behavior and exogenous factors affect their future utility, and thus exaggerate the degree to which their future preferences resemble their current preferences. We present evidence which demonstrates the prevalence of such projection bias, and develop a...

This paper examines patent protection in an endogenous-growth model. Our aim is twofold. First, we show how the patent policies discussed by the recent patent-design literature can influence R&D in the endogenous-growth framework, where the role of patents has been largely ignored. Second, we...

In active investment climates where firms sequentially improve each other's products, a patent can terminate either because it expires or because a non-infringing innovation displaces its product in the market. We define the length of time until one of these happens as the effective patent life,...

We examine how principals should design incentives to induce time-inconsistent procrastinating agents to complete tasks efficiently. Delay is costly to the principal, but the agent faces stochastic costs of completing the task, and efficiency requires waiting when costs are high. If the...

Recent models of procrastination due to self-control problems assume that a procrastinator considers just one option and is unaware of her self-control problems. We develop a model where a person chooses from a menu of options and is partially aware of her self-control problems. This menu model...

This paper explores some of the ways that economists can incorporate insights from recent research combining psychology and economics to help understand risky behavior by adolescents.<BR> June 2000<BR> 1 <A HREF="econ/E00-285_fig.pdf">Figure .pdf</A><BR>

JEL#: A12, B49, D11, D91, E21<BR> Keywords: Addiction, consumption, cooling off, misprediction, projection bias, reference dependence<BR> People underappreciate how their own behavior and exogenous factors affect their future utility, and thus exaggerate the degree to which their future preferences...