Tuesday, April 24, 2007

one way of getting me to read the rest of an article is to have the first paragraph be a capsule summary of a large swath of my life

"In this lecture I shall focus on situations involving repeated decisions with time-inconsistent behavior. Although each choice may be close to maximizing and therefore result in only small losses, the cumulative effect of a series of repeated errors may be quite large. Thus, in my examples, decision makers are quite close to the intelligent, well-informed individuals usually assumed in economic analysis, but cumulatively they make seriously wrong decisions that do not occure in standard textbook economics." -- George A. Akerlof, "Procrastination and Obedience," American Economic Review, 1991.

4 comments:

Ann Althouse said...

Procrastination? What the hell? Where is it Tuesday??? You'd better be in Australia, or I'm going to be very annoyed!

Anonymous said...

HE will be very annoyed that you did not read/remember his posting-date credo -- to wit, HE dates to maintain a proper continuum, lest there be a hole somewhere when he forgets to procrastinate or whatever -- oh, I don't know why he does it ... HE just does.

Anonymous said...

need better committment mechanisms, in my opinion.

jeremy said...

I have ambivalence about the idea of me posting more than once a day, which prompts the postdating.

Committment mechanisms are wise things, if one can pull them off.