【Theory seminar】Ulysses Revisited: or How an Expressed Preference for External Control Reveals the Limit of Willpower
2021/11/16
研討會日期 : 2021-11-16
時間 : 14:30
主講人 : Professor Meng-Yu Liang (梁孟玉)
主持人 : Professor Hsuan-Chih Lin
地點 : Conference Room B110
演講者簡介 : Professor Liang received her Ph.D. in Economics from University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1999. She is currently an Associate Research Fellow at the Institute of Economics, Academia Sinica. Her research fields are Microeconomic Theory, Game Theory, Information Economics, and Behavior Economics.
演講摘要 : Being “hooked” on tempting goods is a serious problem for many in society. Modeling such behavior with tractable utility functions can help us understand better the predicament facing such “wretched men.” We use the revealed preference approach to identify a preference for external control for a decision maker facing a binding willpower constraint in the absense of such external control. We revisit the classic story of Ulysses and the Sirens to demonstrate that the choice behavior (over menus) exhibited by Ulysses can neither be accommodated by Gul and Pesendorfer’s (2001) model of costly self-control temptation preferences nor by Noor and Takeoka’s (2010) extension to an increasing (that is, “uphill”) self-control cost.
