Sophistication about Self-Control

Asymmetric Näıveté: Beliefs about Self-Control

Individuals’ beliefs regarding their own and others’ present bias are pivotal to understanding interactions between multiple present-biased individuals. While several studies document individuals’ näıveté about their own present bias, beliefs regarding others remain unexplored. This paper investigates beliefs about one’s own and others’ present bias within a unified experimental setting, both i...

M-sophistication

The m-sophistication of a finite binary string x is introduced as a generalization of some parameter in the proof that complexity of complexity is rare. A probabilistic near sufficient statistic of x is given which length is upper bounded by the m-sophistication of x within small additive terms. This shows that m-sophistication is lower bounded by coarse sophistication and upper bounded by soph...

Sophistication Revisited

Control Strategy Robustness with Respect to Hydraulic Model Sophistication

The robustness of the control strategies developed in the COST 624 benchmark have been tested against the sophistication of the model describing the hydraulic behaviour of the biological reactor of a wastewater treatment plant by activated sludge. In such a large biological reactor of the channel type, hydrodynamics are intermediate between plug flow and well-mixed and are function of the liqui...

Exploiting Naivete about Self-Control in the Credit Market∗

We develop a model of the credit market where competitive lenders offer long-term contracts specifying a non-linear schedule of possible repayment schedules to borrowers who may differ both in their taste for immediate gratification (β) and their prior beliefs about that taste (β̂). The equilibrium contract to a borrower with given beliefs β̂ is discontinuous: it features an advantageous option i...