Collaborative Research: Foundations for Comparative Naivete and Sophistication

消费者经常会做出不一致的决定。例如，他们可能会受到诱惑，在某个特定日期消费比之前预算的更多，而为未来消费留下的更少。对时间不一致问题的意识使消费者能够利用承诺手段来约束他们未来的决定：一个预计到储蓄不足的消费者可能会将一些资产转移到非流动性储蓄工具中，比如避税的退休账户，以承诺将这笔钱存到以后的某个日期。然而，越来越多的证据表明，许多人对自己未来的自我控制能力持有不准确的信念，并天真地期望做出更有益的选择。对时间不一致的天真看法可能会破坏某些政策工具（如退休账户）的有效性，因为天真的消费者将无法充分利用这些承诺工具。这个研究项目的目标是研究消费者何时做出不一致的选择，以及他们能够预测他们未来与当前计划偏差的程度。这个项目将开发一种衡量消费者对自己未来选择的幼稚或成熟程度的新方法，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的全动态模型，允许使用动态规划技术，将天真与金融和宏观经济学中的主力模型更紧密地联系起来。这一基础理论的重要性在于用一种足够广泛的语言来理解天真，以便在公民具有不同程度的天真的情况下发展和理解干预的含义，并通过各种不同的形式模型最好地近似。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广泛的影响。

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.