Working Paper: Present Bias and Everyday Self-Control Failures

Using the M-DRM, we wrote a working paper that is summarised below and that can be found here.

In this paper we integrated recent theoretical and methodological developments from psychological self-control research into the economic analysis of present bias. We presented the T-SC model of intertemporal choice which is a modification of the quasi-hyperbolic discounting model and suggests that present bias is the outcome of the intraindividual conflict between temptation (T) and self-control (SC). We tested predictions generated by this model in a study using state of the art measurement techniques for present bias, trait temptation, and trait self-control, as well as a novel day reconstruction technique to elicit components of self-control problems as they occur in everyday life.

The results suggest that there is no association between experimentally elicited present bias and self-control failures, neither when measured on the trait level nor when measured in everyday life. This suggests that experimentally elicited present bias using monetary rewards does not provide a good measure for self-control problems, which might explain the typically weak associations between experimentally elicited present bias and field behaviors that are potentially influenced by self-control problems. However, our results do suggest that using temptation and self-control to explain present bias is a useful theoretical modification of the quasi-hyperbolic discounting model as the new T-SC model provides several predictions about self-control problems that we can confirm with our everyday data.