Christmas comes but once a year - so how come it seems to take me by surprise as far as gift shopping goes? Of course, despite the advance warning, I never contemplate doing the shopping in September, partly because I am not conditioned to think about the gifts until the requsite environmental cues are salient enough to induce mild panic. Gifts bought early also stand a greater chance of being discovered. There’s also my enormous indecisiveness over what gifts to buy even when I am presented with a list of wants. This is partly my own desire to surprise my loved ones with things I think they want (my wife, also an economist, manages this without fail each year: I call it understanding my preferences, she calls it paying attention to what I say). So every year, I spend a week or so before Christmas rushing around, without a plan and end up buying too much.
I’m probably no different from other people in lacking an incentive to do the shopping sufficiently early to offset the stress, until now that is. This year, our bundle of joy, due next week, has created for me the perfect pre-committment device - a mechanism to ensure I stick to my promise to do the shopping early. I believe that after the baby comes I will be too busy and too tired to contemplate shopping. Tme suddenly feels scarce and I know that if I fail to hit the high street before the baby comes, there will be no Christmas. As a pre-committment device, it’s quite expensive, but if you’re planning a family anyway then the marginal cost is pretty much zero.
The idea of strapping yourself to the mast to avoid the lure of Syrens is nothing new, even though it seems counterintuitive that restricting your choice or budget set can be better for you in the long run. Gordon Brown’s decision to give the Bank of England independence to set interest rates was based on the same logic, and ensured that he wouldn’t be able to exploit the fiscal situation to meet a monetary target that he kept moving.
To deny our weaknesses is to have supreme confidence in knowing our own preferences and sticking to them. Me? I cheat myself. Frequently. The interesting question is of course whether any one else should intervene and ’solve’ my pre-committment problem, assuming they know the problem exists in the first place. Despite being weak though I also place a high value on substantive freedom and process, not just final outcomes, even if I sometimes get it wrong. Also, there isn’t yet a technology (other than a spouse) that can truly know me better than I know myself.
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