We model how people formulate and evaluate goals to overcome self-control problems. People often attempt to regulate their behavior by evaluating goal-related outcomes separately (in narrow psychological accounts) rather than jointly (in a broad account). To explain this evidence, our theory of...

The Chichilnisky criterion is an explicit social welfare function that satisfies compelling conditions of intergenerational equity. However, it is time inconsistent and has no optimal solution in the Ramsey model. By investigating stationary Markov equilibria in the game that generations with...

We model how people formulate and evaluate goals to overcome self-control problems. People often attempt to regulate their behavior by evaluating goal-related outcomes separately (in narrow psychological accounts) rather than jointly (in a broad account). To explain this evidence, our theory of...

It is a puzzle why people often evaluate consequences of choices separately (narrow bracketing) rather than jointly (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...

The model of time-inconsistent procrastination by O'Donoughe and Rabin shows that individuals who are not aware of their present-bias (naïve) procrastinate more than individuals who are aware of it (sophisticated) or are not present-biased (time-consistent). This paper tests this prediction. We...

Substantial evidence in field, lab and thought experiments in multiple disciplines, shows that decision makers often choose a dominated strategy, which contradicts with current economic theory. To bridge this gap between theory and evidence, first, we propose two alternative axiomatic...

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...

Prior literature suggests that the zero-earnings discontinuity is caused by earnings management. This makes sense if investors are naíve. We test for the possibility of investor naíveté and find that they are aware of firms performing earnings management around zero reported earnings and that...

We study centipede games played by an infinite sequence of players. Following the literature on time-inconsistent preferences, we distinguish two types of decision makers, naive and sophisticated, and the corresponding solution concepts, naïve ϵ-equilibrium and sophisticated ϵ-equilibrium. We...

Although the elderly are more vulnerable to COVID-19, the empirical evidence suggests that they do not behave more cautiously in the pandemic than younger individuals. This theoretical model argues that some individuals might not comply with the COVID-19 measures to reassure themselves that they...