| Salience costs, along with imperfect foresight, have been used in previous studies to explain procrastination of a one-time task. A companion to this paper, "Read This Paper Later: Procrastination with Time-Consistent Preferences" analyzes the extent to which procrastination of a divisible task is compatible with rational behavior. While the fully rational model explains key qualitative observations, it requires an extremely high rate of time preference or elasticity of intertemporal substitution to generate serious procrastination and cannot explain undesired procrastination at all. This paper investigates the extent to which dynamically inconsistent preferences can better explain such impatience and address the issue of self-control failures. Two types... |
