Procrastination and Learning about Self-Control

We study a model of task completion with the opportunity to learn about own self-control problems over time. While the agent is initially uncertain about her future self-control, in each period she can choose to learn about it by paying a non-negative learning cost and spending one period. If the agent has time-consistent preferences, she always chooses to learn whenever the learning is beneficial. If the agent has time-inconsistent preferences, however, she may procrastinate such a learning opportunity. Further, if her time preferences exhibit inter-temporal conflicts between future selves (e.g., hyperbolic discounting), the procrastination of learning can occur even when the learning cost is zero. Such procrastination also leads to non-completion of the task. Our results help explain why people pursue implausible dreams and never start any task instead of taking better alternatives. When the agent has multiple initially uncertain attributes (e.g., own future self-control and own ability for the task), the agent's endogenous learning decisions may be misdirected – she chooses to learn what she should not learn from her initial perspective, and she chooses not to learn what she should.