Dear Economist
I have the habit of setting my watch five minutes fast. This fools me into avoiding being three minutes late for meetings, or the train ? well, more often than not ? and instead being two minutes early. But if I am a rational economic agent, how do I succeed in fooling myself so systematically?
Yours (in haste),
Mark, Oxford
Dear Mark,
That is a big “if”. Economists frequently explain eccentric behaviour with a model of two rational agents in one body, battling to outwit each other.
In your case, one agent (the one who is always late) is impatient: the risk of missing a train in half an hour is unimportant compared with the instant satisfaction to be derived from having one more sip of coffee.
Your more patient half disagrees. There seems to be some sort of stickiness in your perception of time. Stickiness is a feature of retail prices, because retailers will absorb a certain amount of inflation before spending money on repainting signs and reprinting catalogues. However at some stage - perhaps a five or 10 per cent increase in the price level - the fixed cost of that reprinting must be paid.
Your impatient self clearly suffers from a similar fixed cost of carrying out subtraction. If your watch was, say, 47 minutes fast, this fixed cost would have to be borne every time you looked at it, because being 47 minutes early for everything is even more costly than having to perform mental arithmetic. Five minutes, like a 1 per cent increase in the price level, is more tolerable.
To summarise: you have a split personality, a warped view of time and are too lazy to do simple sums. Now put down this magazine: I suspect you are running late for something.
教教我时间管理
亲爱的经济学家：
我习惯于把自己的手表调快5分钟。这种自欺欺人的办法，让我避免因为晚3分钟而无法赶上会议或火车——我经常如此——相反还能提前2分钟。但是，如果我是个理性的经济人，如何才能成功地做到如此系统地欺骗自己呢?
你的(匆忙的)，
牛津读者马克
亲爱的马克：
这是一个巨大的“如果”。经济学家经常用一种模型来解释古怪的行为，即一个主体内有两个理性行动者，它们争着显示自己比对方高明。
在你的例子中，一个行动者(经常迟到的.那位)很急躁：与多喝一口咖啡所能立即得到的满足感相比，错过半小时后的火车的风险并不重要。
你身上更有耐心的那个行动者不同意这种做法。因此你在对时间的看法上似乎有某种执着。执着是零售价格的一种特性，因为零售商在花钱重新喷涂招牌并重印价目表之前，将承受一定的通胀。然而，在某些阶段——价格水平可能上涨了5%或10%——就必须支付重新打印的固定成本。
你身上那个急躁的自我，显然在实施减法时承受着类似的固定成本。比如说，如果你的手表被拨快了47分钟，那你每次看表的时候都要承担这种固定成本，因为提前47分钟的成本甚至要高于必须进行心算本身。而5分钟的时间，就像价格上1%的升幅，更容易承受。
最后总结一下：你的性格有些分裂，时间观点扭曲，而且过于懒惰，以至于连简单算数题也不想做。现在，赶紧放下这本杂志：我猜你可能又要迟到了。
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