Futile attempts at self-control

Paul Heidhues; Botond Koszegi

doi:10.1162/JEEA.2009.7.2-3.423

Futile attempts at self-control

Paul Heidhues^*, Botond Koszegi

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article › peer-review

Abstract (may include machine translation)

We investigate costly yet futile attempts at self-control when consumption of a harmful product has a binary breakdown/no-breakdown nature and individuals tend to underestimate their need for self-control. Considering time-inconsistent preferences as well as temptation disutility, we show that becoming more sophisticated can decrease welfare and investigate what kind of mistaken beliefs lead to low welfare. With time-inconsistent preferences, being close to perfectly understanding one's preferences but assigning zero probability to true preferences induces the worst outcome.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	423-434
Number of pages	12
Journal	Journal of the European Economic Association
Volume	7
Issue number	2-3
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1162/JEEA.2009.7.2-3.423
State	Published - Mar 2009
Externally published	Yes

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10.1162/JEEA.2009.7.2-3.423

Cite this

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Futile attempts at self-control

Abstract (may include machine translation)

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