Competition Alleviates Present Bias in Task Completion

09/29/2020
by   Aditya Saraf, et al.
0

We build upon recent work [Kleinberg and Oren, 2014, Kleinberg et al., 2016, 2017] that considers present biased agents, who place more weight on costs they must incur now than costs they will incur in the future. They consider a graph theoretic model where agents must complete a task and show that present biased agents can take exponentially more expensive paths than optimal. We propose a theoretical model that adds competition into the mix – two agents compete to finish a task first. We show that, in a wide range of settings, a small amount of competition can alleviate the harms of present bias. This can help explain why biased agents may not perform so poorly in naturally competitive settings, and can guide task designers on how to protect present biased agents from harm. Our work thus paints a more positive picture than much of the existing literature on present bias.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 2

page 3

page 4

research
12/29/2020

Present-Biased Optimization

This paper explores the behavior of present-biased agents, that is, agen...
research
06/24/2019

Penalty Bidding Mechanisms for Allocating Resources and Overcoming Present Bias

From skipped exercise classes to last-minute cancellation of dentist app...
research
06/21/2021

Stochastic Model for Sunk Cost Bias

We present a novel model for capturing the behavior of an agent exhibiti...
research
01/28/2023

Towards Learning Rubik's Cube with N-tuple-based Reinforcement Learning

This work describes in detail how to learn and solve the Rubik's cube ga...
research
06/04/2017

Planning with Multiple Biases

Recent work has considered theoretical models for the behavior of agents...
research
12/06/2021

Inconsistent Planning: When in doubt, toss a coin!

One of the most widespread human behavioral biases is the present bias –...
research
03/26/2022

Competition-Based Resilience in Distributed Quadratic Optimization

This paper proposes a novel approach to resilient distributed optimizati...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset