Hi all, pardon my brief departure. I have been working on an essay assignment about procrastination which is due in 3 days, and so have been slaving over that. This entry is about the main points of 2 articles I have read regarding procrastination. They are by O'Donoghue and Rabin (1999) and Fischer (1999) (I cannot link the articles here as they are in subscribed journals).
O'Donoghue and Rabin basically aim to model procrastination by showing present-biased preferences, where individuals are impatient and favour now over later. They use a mathematical formula and calculations to derive their results. Fischer also uses mathematical models to construct her ideas, but hers come with diagrams of marginal utility and what happens when the discount rate changes (and hence when the rate of time preference changes), and we can see procrastination visually. Both are technical papers, but the intuitive result is this: it is the individual's perception of their own impatience or their own subjective valuation of their discount rates that makes them procrastinate.
How interesting! The question that remains is, what exactly is our individual discount rates?!
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