Procrastination and the Law

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Abstract

There is a large literature in behavioral economics finding that people routinely override their long-term preferences due to the pull of immediate gratification. With this in mind, this paper develops a simple model of repeated procrastination that can be used to examine the efficacy of legal rules. Among other things, the model leads to the following counter-intuitive result: a person who from a long-term perspective believes that violating the law is economically worthwhile, may nonetheless repeatedly procrastinate following through with the planned misconduct. This sort of "time-inconsistent obedience" helps explain an important puzzle in the criminal law literature: the fact that people routinely obey the law even though the expected benefits of disobedience greatly exceed the expected sanctions. The phenomenon of time-inconsistent obedience has implications beyond the problem of unintended over-deterrence. In particular, I argue that lawmakers who are sufficiently aware of the self-control problems of citizens can take advantage of them by engaging in "stealth regulation": creating legal rules that lead people to repeatedly procrastinate doing otherwise legal activities. I show how even relatively low hurdles for getting abortions can have a much larger impact on reducing the number of abortions than one would expect if one were to assume that people have perfect self-control. Additionally, I extend the concepts of time-inconsistent obedience and stealth regulation to interactions between private parties, such as co-conspirators, corporate participants, and spouses.