Asymmetric Naïveté: Beliefs About Self-Control.

This article investigates whether individuals anticipate time inconsistency, specifically present bias, in themselves and others, using an online laboratory experiment involving a real-effort task. The findings reveal that participants exhibit significant present bias but show little awareness of their own bias (naïveté), while holding substantially more accurate beliefs about others' present bias, as captured by the present bias parameter β (estimated at 0.82 for actual behavior, 1.03 for self-predictions, and 0.87 for beliefs about others). This asymmetric naïveté correlates with overoptimism about one's own task enjoyment and time availability relative to others. The study's structural model and robustness checks support these results, which have implications for competitive, collaborative, and hierarchical settings such as workplace teams, incentive design, household consumption, and management practices, highlighting the role of differential beliefs in shaping group interactions and decision-making.