Economic Models of Procrastination

The chapter compares a leading psychological account of procrastination and related phenomena-the picoeconomic framework of George Ainslie-with economic models of self-control lapses generally and procrastination specifically. By "economic," reference is intended to models that admit of solution by maximizing utility functions and that can be tested econometrically against behavioral or neural processing data. The chapter demonstrates how bargaining games among picoeconomic interests (as Ainslie depicts them) can take two forms. One of these forms corresponds to dual-self models of selfcontrol that have unique Markov Perfect Nash Equilibria as solutions. The other form has yet to be modeled, but promising tools for the job are in place.