Entrapment, Temptation and Virtue Testing

Talking Virtue: professionalism and virtue ethics

The twentieth century phenomenon of professionalism had a major impact on the economy of nation states and has been recognised as a key element of post-industrial societies. As an anointed class, professionals reserved the right to prescribe their own roles and responsibilities. Critics of professional interests, however, have described professionals’ own definition of their roles and responsib...

Temptation and Self-Control†

In a two period decision problem, we study individuals who, in the second period, may be tempted by ex ante inferior choices. Individuals have preferences over sets of alternatives that represent the feasible choices in the second period. Our axioms yield a representation that identifies the individual’s commitment ranking, her temptation ranking, and her cost of selfcontrol. We provide an axio...

To “ Temptation and Taxation ” (

Temptation and Revealed Preference

Gul and Pesendorfer [9] model the static behavior of an agent who ranks menus prior to the experience of temptation. This paper models the dynamic behavior of an agent whose ranking of menus itself is subject to temptation. The representation for the agent’s dynamically inconsistent choice behavior views him as possessing a dynamically consistent view of what choices he “should”make (a normativ...

Temptation 1

This survey discusses decision–theoretic models of agents who seek to constrain and regulate their own future behavior. The common theme is that the decision makers’ future utility is affected by unwanted temptations. The wish to eliminate temptations from future option sets creates a preference for commitment. The surveyed models explore the relationship between temptations and other psycholog...