When perfectionism becomes willpower

Daniele Pennesi ()

Working Papers from Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna

Abstract: Perfectionism can be healthy: striving for perfection requires the ability to selfregulate, namely willpower. This paper formalizes the intuitive relation between healthy perfectionism and willpower in the presence of temptation. The value of a menu of options for an individual with limited willpower corresponds to the lower bound of the value assigned to the same menu by a perfectionist, when temptation and perfectionism intensities are free to vary. Moreover, the higher the perfectionism strive, the higher the willpower. The relation between overwhelming temptation and the Strotz model is a particular case of the result. When there is uncertainty about temptation, we generalize Dekel and Lipman (2012) providing conditions such that a preference is represented by a random willpower representation, if and only if, it has an equivalent random perfectionism representation.

JEL-codes: D01 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-mic
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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