Research

Working Papers

Uncertain Task Length and Procrastination  (Job Market Paper) [link to paper] [link to slides]

Procrastination is conceptualized as the unnecessary delay of an intended task. It is linked to poor mental health, low academic scores, and decelerated job promotions. At the hands of important institutions and people in authority, like policymakers, it can cause substantial harm. Traditionally, present bias has been used to understand procrastination in economics literature. This paper moves away from behavioural reasons for procrastination and explores the channel of information in a standard Bayesian expected utility maximizing framework. Specifically, the paper examines the role of information regarding the time needed to complete a task in understanding procrastination via a theoretical model followed by a lab experiment to test the main results. Task quality, as opposed to just task completion, is studied both in the theoretical and experimental setup. Procrastination in the lab experiment is identified by directly observing the time allotted to task and task performance. The model predicts a reduction in procrastination after providing information regarding the time needed to complete a task, but only if the gap between the time required and the time until the deadline is not high enough for the agent to catch up by learning. The experimental data supports the predictions made in the model. There is evidence of endogenous learning in the absence of full information regarding the time needed to complete the task as predicted.

Task Information and Academic Procrastination [link to paper]

Academic procrastination is widely prevalent. Studies indicate that around 80% of students engage in procrastination and associate it with poor academic scores. This paper explores the relationship between procrastination and poor academic performance to test if missing information regarding the time needed to complete a task affects delay and the associated performance. The main research questions are: Does lack of information about the time needed to complete a task induce task delay? Does delayed time allocation to the task (too close to the deadline) translate to poor task performance? A quasi-natural experiment was conducted in an online classroom setting over one semester to answer these questions. The information about the time needed to complete a quiz during the course varied by quizzes. The results show a strong negative relationship between delay and performance. Also, the data provides evidence of the provision of information regarding the time needed to complete the quiz, leading to reduced procrastination (task delay) and improved performance.

Work in Progress

Incentive to Innovate under Consumer Inattention

In a market for goods with multiple attributes, consumers may pay more attention to some attributes relative to others, which, in turn, should affect the decisions of firms regarding these attributes. The paper analyzes the effect of consumer inattention on decisions of vertically differentiated firms. Two firms compete in a two-stage game, deciding the quality and then competing in prices. Consumer inattention is captured by the salience theory of inattention developed by Berdalo et al. (2013), under which the consumer attention to an attribute depends on the attributes of the offered products, implying a two-way feedback between firm choices and consumer choices. This competition among firms for consumer attention is studied by Berdalo et al. (2015) with a single salient consumer. My paper extends it to two consumers, one attentive and one inattentive, and studies the incentives of a monopolist to offer a high-quality product when there is an entry threat in the next period. The results show that the monopolist’s incentive to provide a high-quality product in period one is weakly higher under consumer inattention. Under certain conditions, there is a trade-off between higher profits in period 1 and reduced profits in period 2 from selling a high-quality good in period 1. The benefit outweighs the loss when the cost of producing a high-quality good is lower for the monopolist in period 1 than for the entrant in period 2.

Research Statement