Rational temporal predictions can underlie apparent failures to delay gratification

Joseph Kable
University of Pennsylvania

People are often observed to begin pursuing a delayed goal, only to later abandon this pursuit before the 
goal is reached. Examples include starting a diet to lose weight but then giving up on the diet, quitting 
smoking to improve health but then relapsing, and joining a gym to get fit but then rarely using the 
membership. Behavioral economists have typically modeled such behavior as an intertemporal 
preference reversal, or violation of the stationarity axiom, of the type predicted by naïve hyperbolic or 
quasi-hyperbolic discounting. In this talk I will argue for an alternative explanatory framework, in which 
the failure to persist towards delayed goals arises from a rational reevaluation process regarding 
temporally uncertain delayed rewards. I will discuss the theoretical, behavioral and neural data that 
support this account.