TY  - JOUR
AU  - Ozdenoren,Emre
AU  - Salant,Stephen
AU  - Silverman,Dan
TI  - Willpower and the Optimal Control of Visceral Urges
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 12278
PY  - 2006
Y2  - June 2006
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12278
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w12278.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Emre Ozdenoren
University of Michigan
Department of Economics
Ann Arbor, MI  48109
E-Mail: emreo@umich.edu

Stephen Salant
Department of Economics
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor, MI   48109
E-Mail: ssalant@umich.edu

Dan Silverman
Department of Economics
University of Michigan
611 Tappan Street
Ann Arbor, MI 48109-1220
Tel: 734/764-2447
Fax: 734/764-2769
E-Mail: dansilv@umich.edu
M2  - featured in NBER digest on 2006-06-05
AB  - Common intuition and experimental psychology suggest that the ability to self-regulate, willpower, is a depletable resource. We investigate the behavior of an agent who optimally consumes a cake (or paycheck or workload) over time and who recognizes that restraining his consumption too much would exhaust his willpower and leave him unable to manage his consumption. Unlike prior models of self-control, a model with willpower depletion can explain the increasing consumption sequences observable in high frequency data (and corresponding laboratory findings), the apparent links between unrelated self-control behaviors, and the altered economic behavior following imposition of cognitive loads. At the same time, willpower depletion provides an alternative explanation for a taste for commitment, intertemporal preference reversals, and procrastination. Accounting for willpower depletion thus provides a more unified theory of time preference. It also provides an explanation for anomalous intratemporal behaviors such as low correlations between health-related activities.
ER  -