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.
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.
Supported in partVerified against the work's full text
Thaler and Shefrin discuss precommitment as the present self binding the later self, with savings plans and self-bets as examples, but not marriage vows or gym memberships.
“Since the individual knows his preferences will change he precommits behavior to enforce his current preferences on himself later.”
- 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.
- 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.
SupportedVerified against the work's full text
Thaler and Shefrin observe that savings behavior is nearly dominated by institutions reducing the individual's flexibility, naming “Christmas clubs, mandatory pension plans, social security, payroll savings plans, whole life insurance policies, and piggy banks”, and, after Strotz's Odyssey example, conclude that “precommitment can be a very effective self-control strategy”. They model the person as containing two psyches, “the planner and the doer”. Those devices and that model are what the sentence attributes to them. The work's counterparts to illiquid retirement accounts are mandatory pension plans and social security, and its planner-doer conflict is a within-person principal-agent relation rather than bargaining among future selves.
“Some examples are Christmas clubs, mandatory pension plans, social security, payroll savings plans, whole life insurance policies, and piggy banks.”
- 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.
Supported in partVerified against the work's full text
Thaler and Shefrin model the self as planner and doer and read pension plans and payroll deduction savings as self-control devices answering dynamic inconsistency.
“In fact, savings behavior is nearly dominated by institutions that reduce the individual's flexibility. Some examples are Christmas clubs, mandatory pension plans, social security, payroll savings plans, whole life insurance policies, and piggy banks.”
- 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.
Verification¶
Does it exist? Confirmed. This work's DOI resolves to a registered record, which fixes its identity. That is all it fixes.
Does it back the claim? Read against the text for 3 of 3 citations: 1 supported, 2 supported in part. Each verdict is shown under its citation below, with what in the work backs the sentence.
Support is checked per citation rather than per work — the same source can be cited soundly in one article and wrongly in another. Per-citation recording began recently, so a citation with no recorded check is a gap in the record rather than evidence it went unchecked.
See how references were verified.
Registry ID ref:9365c606988a · see in the full table