THE MULTI-FACES OF PROCRASTINATION

Nazaria Solferino ()
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Nazaria Solferino: Dipartimento di Economia e Statistica, Università della Calabria

No 201013, Working Papers from Università della Calabria, Dipartimento di Economia, Statistica e Finanza "Giovanni Anania" - DESF

Abstract: Often people procrastinate unpleasant tasks for immediate gratification in doing nothing today. Therefore many scholars have been engaged in designing incentive schemes to avoid it. We think the process is very complicated and many features need to be analyzed, as the subjective evaluations of succeeding and rewards. Moreover, sometime people procrastinate because they feel insecure, investing to improve their performance hoping in a better result in the long run. This process can be dangerous, producing as result that we call “the curse of perfectionism”. Nevertheless procrastination may also have positive consequences if people spend their time in alternative activities, also useful for other ex post best rewarded tasks. We call this case as “productive procrastination”. In this paper we explore all these possibilities and underline conditions for they happen. We also discuss our results according to the difference between naive and sophisticated subjects.

Keywords: Time-Inconsistent Preferences; Optimal Effort; Procrastination; Inter-temporal Choice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A12 D03 D11 D74 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 22 pages
Date: 2010-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe
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