Abstract
In this thesis I study academic procrastination, and try to look at the phenomenon from various angles and approaches. I start out reviewing the literature on the subject, from both an economic and psychological perspective. While psychologists mostly emphasize the various personality traits and individual differences of the people who procrastinate, economists have focused their attention to time preference, and how procrastinators might discount the future differently from others. In particular, models of present bias seem to fit both experimental and real world data, as well as our intuition, better than models using standard exponential discounting. In Part II of the thesis, I discuss and analyze the results from two surveys performed on economics students at the University of Oslo. Procrastination is inherently difficult to identify and measure, and therefore I rather attempt to measure how well prepared the students are for the two lectures where they are surveyed. Before the first lecture, the students had the opportunity to complete some online preparation exercises, and the availability of these creates an incentive mechanism that may induce procrastinating students to prepare, without affecting the behavior of exponentially discounting students much. I formally describe the decision process of the students using a model of present bias, and find that the level of preparations is likely to be affected by both the degree of present bias and the students awareness of their own self-control problems. And indeed, the reported levels of preparations are significantly higher for the lecture where the preparation exercises were available. I then estimate a multiple regression model in Stata, with the difference in the levels of preparations between the two lectures where the surveys were held as the dependent variable. As explanatory variables, I use the survey responses to various statements regarding the study habits and attitudes of the students, as well as some more standard, demographic variables. While much of the variation in the difference in levels of preparation can be explained by how busy the students are (e.g., if they have a job) and measures for how they value lecture preparations relative to other educational activities, I find a significant effect that may imply that for students who prepare less than they want, the preparation exercises may have worked as a remedy for procrastination.