Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don't Have All the Facts · chapter 6 · id thinking-in-bets-c6-10-night-jerry-from-seinfeld-illu
“Night Jerry (from Seinfeld) illustrates how our present and future selves are effectively different people with competing interests, which is why precommitment devices are necessary.”
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Wikipedia, Hyperbolic discountingsource alive
Hyperbolic discounting creates time-inconsistent preferences: individuals reveal a strong tendency to make choices inconsistent over time, acting too impatiently for short delays.
Wikipedia, Precommitmentsource alive
Robert Strotz (1955) published a formal analysis of time-inconsistent preferences, discussing how a rational agent might wish to constrain their own future behavior. Jon Elster (1979) developed precommitment as a general strategy of rationality.
Enke (2024), 'Complexity and Hyperbolic Discounting,' Harvard Business School Working Papersource alive
Hyperbolic discounting can arise from computational limitations in evaluating complex intertemporal tradeoffs, suggesting the 'multiple selves' framing has both psychological and computational grounding.
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