UEA the Blog

Lately, I’ve been thinking about why people procrastinate. Hunt Allcott, a visiting professor in the Econ Department, talked about the prevalence of procrastination in his UEA Lunch. Allcott noted that procrastination seems to occur quite frequently, and that many psychological studies have shown that people prefer to procrastinate instead of smoothing work of a certain period of time. But in theory, you would expect that people would finish a constant amount of work each day, until the task is finally completed. Thus, if you have W amount of work, and have N days until you need to complete it, you would finish W/N amount of work each day.

Obviously, this doesn’t seem to be the case empirically. People procrastinate all the time, not just about long, arduous assignments, but also about quick tasks (like doing laundry). It seems, though, that people procrastinate less for quick tasks. If something can be done in a couple minutes, people tend to get it out of the way. However, people tend to really put off longer assignments, like studying for an exam (which you could conceivably have an entire semester to study for).

I came across a paper that explained many of these phenomena. For instance, it went over why people procrastinate at all when it seems in their best interests to complete work at a steady pace. The paper creates a model that incorporates the utility derived from not working. The authors, Markus Brunnermeier, Filippos Papakonstantinou, and Jonathan Parker, posit that overconfidence in one’s own ability to do a certain task leads to incorrect planning. The authors argue that people usually only view the “best case scenario” so that people drastically overestimate their ability to quickly finish a task. However, this overconfidence actually optimizes a person’s utility function. For instance, suppose a task can be completed in two time periods. If a person procrastinates, that person will have more work in the second period, and thus have lower utility during that period. However, during the first period, one’s utility is increased by multiple distinct factors. First, the person gains utility from not actually completing the task. Second, the person gains from expecting to have little work in the second period because of overoptimism. Finally, in the first period, the person has a decrease in perceived uncertainty about the amount of work required (the person thinks he/she knows exactly how much work will be required because of his/her overoptimism). The combined effect of less actual work, less expected work, and greater certainty in the first period outweighs the added work one gains in the second period. Thus, procrastination is actually optimal in terms of maximizing a person’s utility function (the paper proves this in terms of their model in Appendix B).

This paper is exciting not just because of its conclusions, although I always have wondered why people (including me) put things off for so long, but because it also shows the enormous flexibility of economics and economic modeling in particular. One can use economic analysis to explain many different phenomena, even if they do reside in the psychological or sociological realms.