Temptation and Self-Control†
نویسندگان
چکیده
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 axiomatic model of temptation to justify the main assumption of our representation theorem and to analyze second period behavior. An agent has a preference for commitment if she strictly prefers a subset of alternatives to the set itself. An agent has self-control if she resists temptation and chooses an option with higher ex ante utility. We introduce comparative measures of preference for commitment and self-control and relate these measures to our representations. † Both authors gratefully acknowledge financial support from the National Science Foundation.
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