Collaborative Research: Foundations for Comparative Naivete and Sophistication

合作研究：比较天真与成熟的基础

• 批准号: 1357955
• 负责人: David Ahn
• 金额: $ 18.37万
• 依托单位: University of California-Berkeley
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2014-05-01 至 2017-04-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1357955&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Foundations; Comparative; Naivete

Consumers frequently make decisions that are inconsistent across time. For instance, they may be tempted to consume more at a given date than they had previously budgeted, leaving less for future consumption. Awareness of time-inconsistency problems allows consumers to take advantage of commitment devices to constrain their future decisions: A consumer who anticipates being tempted to under-save may channel some assets into illiquid savings instruments such as tax-sheltered retirement accounts to commit to saving that money until a later date. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that many people hold inaccurate beliefs about their future self-control and naively anticipate making more virtuous choices. Naivete about time-inconsistency may undermine the effectiveness of certain policy instruments like retirement accounts, since naive consumers will underutilize these commitment devices. The goal of this research project is to study when consumers make choices that are inconsistent across time and the degree to which they are able to predict their future deviations from current plansThis project will develop a new measure of the level of naivete or sophistication consumers have about their own future choices and will provide new behavioral definitions to test this. The project will also develop a recursive and fully dynamic model that allows for using dynamic programming techniques bringing naivete to closer contact with workhorse models in finance and macroeconomics. The importance of this foundational theory is to understand naivete in a language broad enough to develop and understand the implications of interventions in cases where citizens have heterogeneous degrees of naivete and are best approximated by a variety of different formal models. This project has broader impact for a wide variety of public policy decisions ranging from health management to retirement savings.

消费者经常做出整个时间不一致的决定。例如，他们可能很想在给定的日期消费比以前的预算更多，而将来消费少。意识到时刻问题使消费者能够利用承诺设备来限制其未来的决策：预计被诱惑到储蓄不足的消费者可能会将某些资产引导到流利的储蓄工具中，例如税收削减的退休账户，以便将这笔钱储蓄到以后的日期。但是，越来越多的证据表明，许多人对自己未来的自我控制和天真地期望做出更良好的选择有不正确的信念。关于时间矛盾的天真可能会破坏某些政策工具（例如退休帐户）的有效性，因为幼稚的消费者将不足以这些承诺设备的利用。该研究项目的目的是研究消费者何时做出各个时间不一致的选择，以及他们能够预测未来与当前计划的偏差的程度，这将开发出对消费者对自己未来选择的天真或精致水平的新量度，并将提供新的行为定义来测试这一点。该项目还将开发一个递归且充分的动态模型，该模型允许使用动态编程技术，使Naivete与金融和宏观经济学中的Workhorse模型紧密接触。这种基本理论的重要性是在一种足够广泛的语言中了解天真的，以发展和理解公民具有异质程度的天真性，并且最好通过各种不同的正式模型近似的情况。该项目对从健康管理到退休储蓄等各种公共政策决策具有更大的影响。