It's now or later

Doing It Now or Later

We examine self-control problems — modeled as time-inconsistent, presentbiased preferences—in a model where a person must do an activity exactly once. We emphasize two distinctions: Do activities involve immediate costs or immediate rewards, and are people sophisticated or naive about future self-control problems? Naive people procrastinate immediate-cost activities and preproperate—do too soon...

Prudent parenting: murre now or murre later?

Diving into parenthood is never easy, but for common murres (Uria aalge) some positively prudent parenting is required. These birds have to decide whether they care more about the chicks they have got or about having additional chicks in the future. Anne Storey and her colleagues were able to measure the physiological tell-tale signs of this balancing act both when food is scarce and when food ...

Local recurrence or cardiovascular disease: pay now or later.

© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: [email protected]. Radiation therapy is an essential component of the local management of breast cancer. The overview from the Early Breast Cancer Trialists’ Collaborative Group ( 1 ) indicates that adjuvant radiation therapy after breast-conserving surgery results...

Simulation for American Options: Regression Now or Regression Later?

Pricing American options requires solving an optimal stopping problem and therefore presents a challenge for simulation. This article investigates connections between a weighted Monte Carlo technique and regression-based methods for this problem. The weighted Monte Carlo technique is shown to be equivalent to a least-squares method in which option values are regressed at a later time than in ot...

Additional treatment for pT3 prostate cancer: now, later or never.