Willpower and Personal Rules
基于自我声誉机制，提出意志力与个人规则的理论，解释不完美记忆如何导致自我控制失败，并分析刚性规则引发的强迫行为。
We develop a theory of internal commitments or “personal rules” based on self-reputation over one’s willpower, which transforms lapses into precedents that undermine future self-restraint. The foundation for this mechanism is the imperfect recall of past motives and feelings, leading people to draw inferences from their past actions. The degree of self-control an individual can achieve is shown to rise with his selfconfidence and decrease with prior external constraints. On the negative side, individuals may adopt excessively rigid rules that result in compulsive behaviors such as miserliness, workaholism, or anorexia. We also study the cognitive basis of self-regulation, showing how it is constrained by the extent to which self-monitoring is subject to opportunistic distortions of memory or attribution, and how rules for information processing can themselves be maintained. For helpful comments we are grateful to George Ainslie, Marco Battaglini, Samuel Bowles, John Cochrane, George Loewenstein, Botond Köszegi, Drazen Prelec, Eric Rasmusen, Stefano Della Vigna, and two anonymous referees, as well as to conference and seminar participants at many institutions. Sebastian Ludmer provided excellent research