This paper argues that, to be forward-looking in a logically consistent sense, a decision maker must take account of his overall well-being, not just his instantaneous utility, in all future periods. However, such a decision-maker is necessarily time inconsistent. The paper explores the...

Prominent research argues that consumers often use personal budgets to manage self-control problems. This paper analyzes the link between budgeting and self-control problems in consumption-saving decisions. It shows that the use of good-specific budgets depends on the combination of a demand for...

I analyze common agency games in which the principals, and possibly the agent, have private information. I distinguish between games in which the principals delegate the final decisions to the agent, and games in which they retain some decision power after offering their mechanisms. I show that,...

We study a dynamic model of monopolistic provision of commitment devices to sophisticated, Strotzian decision makers. We allow for unobservable heterogeneity at the contracting stage in the agents' preferences for commitment vs. flexibility. The first-best contracts under complete information...

We study equilibrium behavior in incomplete-information games under two information constraints: seeds and spillovers. The former restricts which agents can initially receive information. The latter specifies how this information spills over to other agents. Our main result characterizes the...