Do Religious Reminders Help You With Your Financial Decisions?

Literature Review

Mischel, Shoda and Rodriguez (1989), demonstrated that people who delayed gratification longer as a child were academically more successful and socially more competent as grown adult individuals. Would that argument be valid in economic settings? Economists measure self-control mostly by means of present bias, which can be defined as not being able to resist instant gratification over a future and larger reward. As Direr (2020) mentions, the term “present-bias” has been used to refer several seemingly similar behavioral biases such as impatience, procrastination, self-control problems, etc. Therefore, a need for its exact characterization, which could differentiate it from these terms, has emerged. This gap has been filled by recent studies (Chakraborty, 2019; Direr, 2020). Our model, which is mainly based on Laibson (1997) model, satisfies Direr’s (2020) characterization.