{"id":192107,"date":"2015-03-17T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2015-03-17T14:37:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/msr-research-item\/long-range-planning-with-time-inconsistency-a-class-of-computational-problems-in-behavioral-economics\/"},"modified":"2016-07-15T15:22:56","modified_gmt":"2016-07-15T22:22:56","slug":"long-range-planning-with-time-inconsistency-a-class-of-computational-problems-in-behavioral-economics","status":"publish","type":"msr-video","link":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/video\/long-range-planning-with-time-inconsistency-a-class-of-computational-problems-in-behavioral-economics\/","title":{"rendered":"Long-Range Planning with Time-Inconsistency: A Class of Computational Problems in Behavioral Economics"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"asset-content\">\n<p>There are many settings where people set long-range goals and make plans to achieve them. Such long-range planning is becoming an integral of the experience in many on-line contexts, where for example people work toward reputational milestones in question-answering sites, build up to administrative roles in open-source authoring domains, and reach educational goals in on-line learning communities.<\/p>\n<p>In order to understand these kinds of processes, we need to enrich our models with the types of human behavioral biases that come into play when people attempt to reach long-range goals. One of the most fundamental among these is the notion that people exhibit behavior that is inconsistent across time \u2014 we allocate a block of time to get work done and then procrastinate, or put effort into a project and then later fail to complete it. An active line of research in behavioral economics and related fields has developed and analyzed models for this type of time-inconsistent behavior.<\/p>\n<p>Here we propose a model in which tasks and goals are represented by a directed graph capturing dependencies, and a a time-inconsistent agent constructs a path through this graph. We first show how instances of this path-finding problem on different input graphs can reconstruct a wide range of qualitative phenomena observed in the literature on time-inconsistency, including procrastination, abandonment of long-range tasks, and the benefits of reduced sets of choices. We then explore a set of analyses that quantify over the set of all graphs; among other results, we find that in any graph, there can be only polynomially many distinct forms of time-inconsistent behavior; and any graph in which a time-inconsistent agent incurs significantly more cost than an optimal agent must contain a large \u201cprocrastination\u201d structure as a minor. Finally, we use this graph-theoretic model to explore ways in which tasks can be designed to help motivate agents to reach designated goals.<\/p>\n<p>This is joint work with Sigal Oren.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><!-- .asset-content --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There are many settings where people set long-range goals and make plans to achieve them. Such long-range planning is becoming an integral of the experience in many on-line contexts, where for example people work toward reputational milestones in question-answering sites, build up to administrative roles in open-source authoring domains, and reach educational goals in on-line [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":198952,"template":"","meta":{"msr-url-field":"","msr-podcast-episode":"","msrModifiedDate":"","msrModifiedDateEnabled":false,"ep_exclude_from_search":false,"_classifai_error":"","msr_hide_image_in_river":0,"footnotes":""},"research-area":[13561,13547],"msr-video-type":[],"msr-locale":[268875],"msr-post-option":[],"msr-session-type":[],"msr-impact-theme":[],"msr-pillar":[],"msr-episode":[],"msr-research-theme":[],"class_list":["post-192107","msr-video","type-msr-video","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","msr-research-area-algorithms","msr-research-area-systems-and-networking","msr-locale-en_us"],"msr_download_urls":"","msr_external_url":"https:\/\/youtu.be\/mUGBBx0-u5g","msr_secondary_video_url":"","msr_video_file":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-video\/192107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-video"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/msr-video"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-video\/192107\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/198952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=192107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"msr-research-area","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/research-area?post=192107"},{"taxonomy":"msr-video-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-video-type?post=192107"},{"taxonomy":"msr-locale","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-locale?post=192107"},{"taxonomy":"msr-post-option","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-post-option?post=192107"},{"taxonomy":"msr-session-type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-session-type?post=192107"},{"taxonomy":"msr-impact-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-impact-theme?post=192107"},{"taxonomy":"msr-pillar","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-pillar?post=192107"},{"taxonomy":"msr-episode","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-episode?post=192107"},{"taxonomy":"msr-research-theme","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cm-edgetun.pages.dev\/en-us\/research\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/msr-research-theme?post=192107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}