Some Insights on Procrastination: A Curse or a Productive Art?

Leonardo Becchetti, Nazaria Solferino and Maria Elisabetta Tessitore

Review of Behavioral Economics, 2015, vol. 2, issue 4, 331-351

Abstract: The choice between performing a task today or procrastinating it until tomorrow or later is the building block of any economic action. In our paper, we aim to enrich the theoretical literature on procrastination by allowing for the possibility of good procrastination together with bad procrastination, and by documenting how procrastination may arise from incomplete information and hyperbolic discounting without further departures from standard preference assumptions. More specifically, we look at the special cases of pathological procrastination, the curse of perfectionism and productive procrastination. We further discuss how our theoretical framework may be applied to different types of (education, investment and production) microeconomic decisions and outline how optimal policy measures change when we consider the possibility of good as well as bad procrastination.

Keywords: Time-inconsistent preferences; Optimal effort; Procrastination; Intertemporal choice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A12 D03 D11 D74 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Some insights on procrastination: a curse or a productive art? (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:now:jnlrbe:105.00000033

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