Self-awareness and self-control

Abstract

People have self-control problems: From a prior perspective, they want to behave relatively patiently, but as the moment of action approaches, they want to behave relatively impatiently. Recently economists have studied the implications of selfcontrol problems for a variety of economic behaviors, such as consumption-savings decisions, procrastination, addiction, information acquisition, and job search. But while there is very little behavioral evidence on degree to which people are aware of their future self-control problems, much of this economic research has assumed full awareness. In this chapter, we discuss alternative assumptions to full awareness, ranging from full unawareness to partial awareness. We argue with some simple illustrations that the degree to which a person is aware of self-control problems is a crucial determinant of the implications of those self-control problems, and hence analyses that assume complete awareness can sometimes be misleading. Because it seems clear that people are, at least to some degree, naive, we conclude that to fully understand the implications of self-control problems, researchers must seriously address the possibility of naivete. Acknowledgments: For financial support, we thank the National Science Foundation (Awards SBR-9709485 and SES-0078796), and Rabin thanks the Russell Sage and MacArthur Foundations. Mail: Ted O’Donoghue / Department of Economics / Cornell University / 414 Uris Hall / Ithaca, NY 14853-7601. Matthew Rabin / Department of Economics / 549 Evans Hall #3880 / University of California / Berkeley, CA 94720-3880. Email: edo1@cornell.edu and rabin@econ.berkeley.edu. CB handles: “golf boy” and “game boy”. Webpages (with related papers): www.people.cornell.edu/pages/edo1/ and elsa.berkeley.edu/~rabin/index.html.

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