Time-Inconsistent Planning: A Computational Problem in Behavioral Economics

In many settings, people exhibit behavior that is inconsistent across time --- we allocate a block of time to get work done and then procrastinate, or put effort into a project and then later fail to complete it. An active line of research in behavioral economics and related fields has developed and analyzed models for this type of time-inconsistent behavior. Here we propose a graph-theoretic model of tasks and goals, in which dependencies among actions are represented by a directed graph, and...