Self-control at College

Gervas Huxley and Mike Peacey

Bristol Economics Discussion Papers from School of Economics, University of Bristol, UK

Abstract: In this paper we develop the observation that college students may suffer from self-control problems (O'Donoghue and Rabin (2007)). In our model students face a self-control problem when making choices about how to learn: students acquire education using different combinations of study and tuition (S and T). We consider an ‘asymmetric’ self-control problem, where students can commit to T but not S and investigate how this affects their decisions. We show that the degree of self-awareness interacts with how students learn and how this determines the ability to self-correct by precommitment. Finally we show how the appropriate pricing of tuition can ameliorate these problems.

Keywords: Human Capital; Learning; Self-control; Hyperbolic Discounting. (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A12 D03 D91 I20 I23 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 26 pages.
Date: 2016-06-17
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-net and nep-neu
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bri:uobdis:16/675

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