Behavioral Economics: Self-Control

Let's take a chestnut:

You and your friends are planning the whole party, and before the main food is ready, you serve a plate of dried fruit - this thing is really delicious, I ate most of the dried fruit, but the main food is not ready, so everyone eats it like this I'm full, so you propose to take the rest of the dried fruit, and everyone agrees with the idea.

This is similar to the logic that we put the alarm clock in the corner of the room in order to wake up early, or the child handed in the mobile phone and hoped to reduce the time of use.

Or let's think about the well-known siren story: crew members wax their ears or tie themselves to keep themselves from being charmed.

In fact, the temptation to take a good night’s sleep today is indeed much greater than the temptation to take a good night’s sleep next week. The temptation of playing with a mobile phone now is much greater than the temptation of playing a mobile phone after the exam. The siren’s singing emmmm may be really good It's tempting -- this tells us a discounted utility model : immediate consumption is more valuable to everyone than future consumption -- but we take our cashews, put our alarms away, hand in our phones, and we put ourselves Tied up, we take steps to limit our options - self-control , which also seems to go against the discounted utility model?

Self-control may mean conflict - can tango dance alone?

We all change our minds at times, but generally we don't take extreme measures to stop ourselves from deviating from our original plan. The only reason you want to stick to the original plan is that you have good reason to think that if you change your preferences, it will be a mistake

"If we do not assume that the mind contains more than one energy system, and that these systems are to some extent independent of each other, it would be paradoxical to want to achieve self-control."

planners and doers

Imagine that a person has two selves ( emphasis: this is just an easy-to-understand assumption ):

One is a forward-looking planner , one that focuses on the future and plans for it;

One is a desperate doer who lives in the moment and only reacts to what is in front of him

Self-control may be about having planners and doers dance a tango together—or play a " game "

And the purpose of both seems to be the pursuit of a maximization of value (or utility?) ?

Is there a method or quantitative indicator for assessing this?

I don't know, keep reading