2. 考研
  3. [A] Each New Year’s Day lots of people make plans to do more exercise or give up smoking. But by January 2nd many of them have n

[A] Each New Year’s Day lots of people make plans to do more exercise or give up smoking. But by January 2nd many of them have n

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问题 [A] Each New Year’s Day lots of people make plans to do more exercise or give up smoking. But by January 2nd many of them have not moved from the sofa or are lighting another cigarette. Such triumphs of optimism over experience are common enough. But like other examples of repeated procrastination, they are hard to explain using standard economic models. [B] When asked why, almost four-fifths of farmers said that they did not have enough money to buy fertiliser for the land they farmed. Yet fertiliser was readily available in multiples of a kilogram, so even poor farmers earned enough to buy fertiliser for at least a fraction of their fields. Better intentions made little difference: virtually all farmers said they planned to use fertiliser the following season, but only 37% actually did so. The reason for this gap between intent and action, the economists argue, is that many farmers are present-biased and procrastinate repeatedly.
[C] In a 1999 paper on the economics of procrastination, Ted O’Donoghue and Matthew Rabin pointed out that people are often unrealistically optimistic about their own future likelihood of doing things—such as exercise or saving—that involve costs at the time they are done, but whose benefits lie even further ahead. Mr. O’Donoghue and Mr. Rabin showed that this sort of behaviour can be explained if people are time-inconsistent. "Present-biased" preferences mean that people will always tend to put off unpleasant things until tomorrow, even if the immediate cost involved is tiny. As long as they are unsure of the precise extent of this bias, they believe (incorrectly) that they will in fact "do it tomorrow". But since they feel this way at each point in time, tomorrow never quite comes. Such a model can therefore explain endless procrastination.
[D] Such predictions can help other procrastinators, too. In recent field trials in the Philippines some smokers who wanted to quit were offered a "commitment contract". Those who signed up put money into a zero-interest bank account. If they passed a test certifying that they were nicotine-free six months later, they got their money back. If not, it went to charity. The contract increased the likelihood of quitting by over 30% over a control group. Those new-year resolutions need not turn to ash.
[E] A model of such preferences generates several interesting predictions. It suggests that a tiny discount—enough to make up for the small costs associated with buying fertiliser— should induce present-biased farmers to make the purchase. The model also suggests that a given discount would be more effective if offered immediately after the harvest rather than just before the next planting period, by which time it would be useful only for those farmers who had no problems with saving money.
[F] It can also suggest ways to change behaviour. A recent NBER paper by Esther Du-flo, Michael Kremer and Jonathan Robinson argues that a tendency to procrastinate may explain why so few African farmers use fertiliser, despite knowing that it raises yields and profits. Only 9% of the farmers believed fertiliser would not increase their profits. Yet only 29% had used any in either of the two preceding seasons.
[G] These models recognise that people prefer to put off unpleasant things until the future rather than do them today. Asked on January 1st to pick a date for that first session in the gym, say, you may well choose to start in two weeks’ time rather than tomorrow. But the standard models also assume that your choices about future actions are "time-consistent"— they do not depend on when you are asked to make the choice. By January 14th, in other words, you should still be committed to going to the gym the next day. In the real world, however, you may well choose to delay your start-date again.
A→41. ( )→—42. ( )→F→43. ( )→44. ( )→45. ( )
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答案G
解析
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