an experiment on time preference and misprediction in unpleasant tasks we experimentally investigate the time inconsistent taste for immediate gratification and future preference misprediction across 7 weeks 100 participants choose the number of unpleasant transcription tasks given various wages to complete immediately and at different future dates participants preferred 10 12 fewer tasks in the present compared to any future date leading to an estimated of 0 83 comparing predictions with actual immediate work choices provides evidence against substantial sophistication with estimates implying that participants understand no more than 24 of their present bias finally we find evidence of projection bias participants wished to complete 4 12 fewer tasks when decisions were elicited right after completing tasks rather than before

working over time dynamic inconsistency in real effort tasks experimental tests of dynamically inconsistent time preferences have largely relied on choices over time dated monetary rewards several recent studies have failed to nd the standard patterns of present bias however such monetary studies contain oftendiscussed confounds in this paper we sidestep these confounds and investigate choices over consumption real eort in a longitudinal experiment we pair this eort study with a companion monetary discounting study we conrm very limited time inconsistency in monetary choices however subjects show considerably more present bias in eort furthermore present bias in the allocation of work has predictive power for demand of a meaningfully binding commitment device therefore our ndings validate a key implication of models of dynamic inconsistency with corresponding policy implications

dynamic inconsistency in food choice experimental evidence from two food deserts despite the great deal of research on dynamic inconsistency in time preferences few studies have ventured into investigating the question in a natural context to address this gap we conduct a natural field experiment with over 200 customers at a grocery store to investigate dynamic inconsistency and the demand for commitment in food choice over a 3 week time period subjects are invited to allocate and re allocate food items received as part of a grocery delivery program we observe substantial dynamic inconsistency in our experiment as well as a demand for commitment among a non negligible number of subjects interestingly individuals who demand commitment are more likely to be dynamically consistent in their prior behavior for academics our work provides direct evidence of dynamic inconsistency in consumption choices in the field and points towards potential extensions to models of temptation for policy makers our findings provide insights on innovations to alter food choices

is addiction rational theory and evidence this paper makes two contributions to the modeling of addiction first we provide new and convincing evidence that smokers are forward looking in their smoking decisions using state excise tax increases that have been legislatively enacted but are not yet effective and monthly data on consumption second we recognize the strong evidence that preferences with respect to smoking are time inconsistent with individuals both not recognizing the true dife culty of quitting and searching for self control devices to help them quit we develop a new model of addictive behavior that takes as its starting point the standard rational addiction model but incorporates time inconsistent preferences this model also exhibits forward looking behavior but it has strikingly different normative implications in this case optimal government policy should depend not only on the externalities that smokers impose on others but also on the internalities imposed by smokers on themselves we estimate that the optimal tax per pack of cigarettes should be at least one dollar higher under our formulation than in the rational addiction case

eliciting temptation and self control through menu choices a lab experiment unlike present biased individuals agents who suffer self control costs as in gul and pesendorfer 2001 may choose to restrict their choice set even when they expect to resist temptation to identify these self control types i design an experiment in which the temptation was to read a story during a tedious task the identification strategy relies on a two step procedure first i measure commitment demand by eliciting subjects preferences over menus that did or did not allow access to the story i then implement preferences using a random mechanism allowing to observe subjects who faced the choice yet preferred commitment a quarter to a third of subjects can be classified as self control types according to their menu preferences when confronted with the choice virtually all of them behaved as they anticipated and resisted temptation these findings suggest that policies restricting the availability of tempting options could have larger welfare benefits than predicted by standard models of present bias

self control and the development of work arrangements a significant part of the development experience is the change in the way work is structured to use a historical example the industrial revolution involved workers moving from agriculture to manufacturing from working on their own to working with others in factories and from flexible work hours to rigid work days how are we to understand these changes why did they occur what impacts did they have on labor productivity and possibly growth in answering questions such as these economic theories draw on different assumptions about aggregate production market failures and innovation yet almost all rely on one of two determinants of labor productivity human capital and incentives human capital theories broadly construed emphasize how work arrangements utilize the distribution of human capital and in learning models facilitate its development incentive theories again broadly construed emphasize how workplace arrangements align worker payoffs to minimize moral hazard in this paper we bring together and advance a growing literature on a third feature worker self control individuals may not be able to work as hard as they would like some workplace arrangements may make self control problems more severe while others may ameliorate them below we describe evidence from a field experiment broadly supportive of the selfcontrol perspective we then argue that many work arrangements can be understood differently through this perspective specifically we

optimal sin taxes abstract we investigate sin taxes on unhealthy items such as fatty foods that people may by their own reckoning consume too much of we employ a standard optimal taxation framework but replace the standard assumption that all consumers have 100 self control with an assumption that some consumers may have some degree of self control problems we show that imposing taxes on unhealthy items and returning the proceeds to consumers can generally improve total social surplus because such taxes counteract over consumption by consumers with self control problems while at the same time they naturally redistribute income to consumers with no self control problems who consume less such taxes can even create pareto improvements finally we demonstrate with some simple numerical examples that even if the population exhibits relatively few self control problems optimal taxes can still be large

why don t present biased agents make commitments since self control problems were first analyzed by strotz 1956 researchers have frequently emphasized that dynamically inconsistent preferences such as present biased preferences engender a demand for commitment 1 here and throughout this paper i define commitment as a pure restriction on one s choice set with no confounding extrinsic benefits such as tax deferral in a savings plan or intra household strategic advantages 2 commitment is a problematic prediction since we see so little of it in the economy researchers have been able to induce some experimental participants to commit themselves e g ashraf karlan and yin 2006 but across a growing literature it is usually the case that only a minority of experimental subjects choose to tie their own hands 3 moreover subjects rarely express a willingness to pay a significant price to have their choice set reduced 4 most importantly very little commitment has arisen in the marketplace without the direct involvement of behavioral economists or their students 5 in the current paper i quantitatively explore the reasons for the missing commitment extending the present biased procrastination model in carroll et al 2009 i show how equilibrium commitment is related to i the standard deviation of the opportunity cost of time ii the cost of delay iii the degree of partial naivete and iv the direct cost of commitment my quantitative analysis implies that commitment is not a robust implication of present biased discounting once one calibrates the model commitment vanishes in many leading cases in other words the benefits of commitment as perceived by the present biased agent are frequently overwhelmed by the costs of commitment this does not imply that we should never expect to see commitment rather in some natural settings like the one studied here commitment is a hothouse flower that survives only under special parameterizations a demand for commitment is a special case rather than the general case section i explains the basic model with sophisticated beliefs and solves it under the assumption that commitment is not available section ii introduces a free commitment technology and characterizes the cases under which commitment will be chosen section iii extends that analysis under the assumption of partial naivete section iv completes the analysis by studying the case in which commitment has a direct cost i e a hassle cost or a market price for setting up a commitment contract section v concludes an associated nber working paper contains proofs

health insurance for humans information frictions plan choice and consumer welfare traditional models of insurance choice are predicated on fully informed and rational consumers protecting themselves from exposure to financial risk in practice choosing an insurance plan is a complicated decision often made without full information in this paper we combine new administrative data on health plan choices and claims with unique survey data on consumer information to identify risk preferences information frictions and hassle costs our additional friction measures are important predictors of choices and meaningfully impact risk preference estimates we study the implications of counterfactual insurance allocations to illustrate the importance of distinguishing between these micro foundations for welfare analysis

the welfare economics of default options in 401 k plans default contribution rates for 401 k pension plans powerfully influence choices potential causes include opt out costs procrastination inattention and psychological anchoring using realistically parameterized models we show how the optimal default the magnitude of the welfare effects and the degree of normative ambiguity depend on the behavioral model the scope of the choice domain deemed welfare relevant the use of penalties for passive choice and other 401 k plan features while results are theory specific our analysis provides reasonably robust justifications for setting the default either at the highest contribution rate matched by the employer or contrary to common wisdom at zero jel d14 d91 j26 j32

attention variation and welfare theory and evidence from a tax salience experiment this article shows that accounting for variation in mistakes can be crucial for welfare analysis focusing on consumer under reaction to not fully salient sales taxes we show theoretically that the efficiency costs of taxation are amplified by differences in under reaction across individuals and across tax rates to empirically assess the importance of these issues we implement an online shopping experiment in which 2 998 consumers purchase common household products facing tax rates that vary in size and salience we replicate prior findings that on average consumers under react to non salient sales taxes consumers in our study react to existing sales taxes as if they were only 25 of their size however we find significant individual differences in this under reaction and accounting for this heterogeneity increases the efficiency cost of taxation estimates by at least 200 tripling existing sales tax rates nearly doubles consumers attention to taxes and accounting for this endogeneity increases efficiency cost estimates by 336 our results provide new insights into the mechanisms and determinants of boundedly rational processing of not fully salient incentives and our general approach provides a framework for robust behavioural welfare analysis

beyond revealed preference choice theoretic foundations for behavioral welfare economics we propose a broad generalization of standard choice theoretic welfare economics that encompasses a wide variety of nonstandard behavioral models our approach exploits the coherent aspects of choice that those positive models typically attempt to capture it replaces the standard revealed preference relation with an unambiguous choice relation roughly x is strictly unambiguously chosen over y written xp y iff y is never chosen when x is available under weak assumptions p is acyclic and therefore suitable for welfare analysis it is also the most discerning welfare criterion that never overrules choice the resulting framework generates natural counterparts for the standard tools of applied welfare economics and is easily applied in the context of specific behavioral theories with novel implications though not universally discerning it lends itself to principled refinements

nudging farmers to use fertilizer theory and experimental evidence from kenya we model farmers as facing small fixed costs of purchasing fertil izer and assume some are stochastically present biased and not fully sophisticated about this bias such farmers may procrastinate post poning fertilizer purchases until later periods when they may be too impatient to purchase fertilizer consistent with the model many farmers in western kenya fail to take advantage of apparently profit able fertilizer investments but they do invest in response to small time limited discounts on the cost of acquiring fertilizer free deliv ery just after harvest calibration suggests that this policy can yield higher welfare than either laissez faire policies or heavy subsidies

judging experimental evidence on dynamic inconsistency abstract this article briefly summarizes and judges recent experimental developments exploring the predictions of dynamically inconsistent models an opinion is provided as to how the literature ma

when commitment fails evidence from a field experiment commitment products can remedy self control problems however imperfect knowledge about their preferences may discontinuously lead individuals to select into incentive incompatible commitments

tying odysseus to the mast evidence from a commitment savings product in the philippines we designed a commitment savings product for a philippine bank and implemented it using a randomized control methodology the savings product was intended for individuals who want to commit now to restrict access to their savings and who were sophisticated enough to engage in such a mechanism we conducted a baseline survey on 1777 existing or former clients of a bank one month later we offered the commitment product to a randomly chosen subset of 710 clients 202 28 4 percent accepted the offer and opened the account in the baseline survey we asked hypothetical time discounting questions women who exhibited a lower discount rate for future relative to current trade offs and hence potentially have a preference for commitment were indeed significantly more likely to open the commitment savings account after twelve months average savings balances increased by 81 percentage points for those clients assigned to the treatment group relative to those assigned to the control group we conclude that the savings response represents a lasting change in savings and not merely a short term response to a new product

pricing rainfall futures at the cme abstract many business people such as farmers and financial investors are affected by indirect losses caused by scarce or abundant rainfall because of the high potential of insuring rainfall risk the chicago mercantile exchange cme began trading rainfall derivatives in 2011 compared to temperature derivatives however pricing rainfall derivatives is more difficult in this article we propose to model rainfall indices via a flexible type of distribution namely the normal inverse gaussian distribution which captures asymmetries and heavy tail behaviour the prices of rainfall futures are computed by employing the esscher transform a well known tool in actuarial science this approach is flexible enough to price any rainfall contract and to adjust theoretical prices to market prices by using the calibrated market price of risk the empirical analysis is conducted with us precipitation data and cme futures data providing first results on the market price of risk for rainfall derivatives

estimating time preferences from convex budgets experimentally elicited discount rates are frequently higher than what seems reasonable for economic decision making such high rates are often attributed to present biased discounting a well known bias of standard measurements is the assumption of linear consumption utility attempting to correct this bias using measures of risk aversion to identify concavity researchers find reasonable discounting but at the cost of exceptionally high utility function curvature we present a new methodology for identifying time preferences both discounting and curvature from simple allocation decisions we find reasonable levels of both discounting and curvature and surprisingly dynamically consistent time preferences jel c91 d12 d81 understanding and estimating time preferences is obviously of great importance to economists marketers and policy makers consumers decide how much to invest in savings education real estate and life insurance how much to diet exercise and smoke whether to marry when to have children and what to leave in their wills while there has been substantial research estimating time preferences using aggregate consumption data 1 the bulk of the effort has occurred in laboratory environments 2 among the many laboratory techniques employed recent studies have favored multiple price lists mpl with monetary payments 3 with mpls individuals are asked multiple times to choose between smaller payment amounts closer to the present and larger amounts further into the future the interest rate increases monotonically in a price list such that the point where an individual switches from preferring sooner payments to later payments carries interval

time consistency stationarity and time invariance a sequence of experiments documents static and dynamic preference reversals between sooner smaller and later larger rewards when the sooner reward could be immediate the theoretically motivated design permits separate identification of time consistent stationary a ndtime invariant choices at least half of the subjects are time consistent but only three quarters of them exhibit stationary choices about half of subjects with time inconsistent choices have stationary preferences these results chal lenge the view that present bias preferences are the main source of time inconsistent choices the past twenty years have seen a surge of interest in time inconsistent preferences mostly this has been motivated by psychological experiments and introspection that have suggested the existence of present bias a decision maker prefers smaller immediate reward to a larger delayed reward but when she is asked about her preferences between these two alternatives when both are equally shifted into the future her preferences are reversed although there is no inconsistency per se in her answers this behavior has been taken to suggest that when the decision maker will be asked to update her choices in the future she will generally deviate from her ex ante plans our goal in the present study is to perform a dynamic preference reversal experiment as such one is required to extend the standard framework of pref erences over temporal payments to a dated collection of such preferences this extension allows us to formally define three distinct properties stationarity im plies that ranking of temporal payments depends only on the time distance and payment distance between the alternatives time invariance assumes that the decision maker evaluates each temporal payment relative to the evaluation pe