Procrastination, self-imposed deadlines and other commitment devices

Alberto Bisin and Kyle Hyndman

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: In this paper we model a decision maker who must exert costly effort to complete a single task by a fixed deadline. Effort costs evolve stochastically in continuous time. The decision maker will then optimally wait to exert effort until costs are less than a given threshold, the solution to an optimal stopping time problem. We derive the solution to this model for three cases: (1) time consistent decision makers, (2) naıve hyperbolic discounters and (3) sophisticated hyperbolic discounters. Sophisticated hyperbolic discounters behave as if they were time consistent but instead have a smaller reward for completing the task. We show that sophisticated decision makers will often self-impose a deadline to ensure early completion of the task. Other forms of commitment are also discussed.

Keywords: Procrastination; Hyperbolic Discounting; Time Consistency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-03-16
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/16235/1/MPRA_paper_16235.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Procrastination, self-imposed deadlines and other commitment devices (2022)
Working Paper: Procrastination, Self-Imposed Deadlines and Other Commitment Devices (2009)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pra:mprapa:16235

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter (winter@lmu.de).