An Economic Theory of Self-Control.

Thaler, R. H., & Shefrin, H. M. (1981). An Economic Theory of Self-Control. Journal of Political Economy, 89(2), 392-406.

Type

Journal article

Intellectual base

Primary research

Year

1981

DOI

10.1086/260971

Link

https://doi.org/10.1086/260971

Cited from

behavioral_economics, economics_finance, psychology

Cited by

3 citations across 3 artifacts.

Each citation links to the sentence it supports in the citing article.

Primes

• Credible Commitment
  • Personal life and clinical practice. Marriage vows, gym memberships, automatic savings withdrawals, and public bets are commitments by the present self against the future self's predicted preference reversal.

    This sourceModels the present self (planner) binding the future self (doer) via precommitment devices against predicted preference reversal.

• Self Control
  • Behavioral economics: Precommitment and self-binding to defeat present-biased preferences — Ulysses contracts, Christmas savings clubs, illiquid retirement accounts — and the planner-doer models that formalize an agent bargaining with its own future selves, as Thaler and Shefrin (1981) framed the economic-self-control problem.
• Temporal Inconsistency and Preference Reversals
  • Pension systems, savings accounts with withdrawal penalties, and automatic deduction plans (removing the need for repeated choice) are designed to address this temporal reversal, an institutional pattern Thaler and Shefrin (1981) explained via their planner-doer model of self-control.

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