Revealing Naïveté and Sophistication from Procrastination and Preproperation

This paper proposes a novel way of distinguishing whether a person is naïve or sophisticated about their own dynamic inconsistency using only their task completion behaviour. I show that adding an extra opportunity to complete the task that goes unused can lead a naïve (but not a sophisticated) person to complete it even later, and can lead a sophisticated (but not a naïve) person to complete the task even earlier. These results provide the framework for revealing the preference and sophistication types studied in O’Donoghue and Rabin (1999) from behaviour in a generalization of their environment.