of commitment mechanisms in mitigating dynamic inconsistency. A curious case of dynamic inconsistency in psychology is described by . In the experiment, subjects of the study were offered free rentals of movies which were classified into two categories - "lowbrow" (e.g., The Breakfast Club) and "highbrow" (e.g., Schindler's List) - and researchers analyzed patterns of choices made. In the absence of dynamic inconsistency, the choice would be expected to be the same regardless of the delay between the decision date and the consumption date. In practice, however, the outcome was different. When subjects had to choose a movie to watch immediately, the choice was consistently lowbrow for the majority of the subjects. But when they were asked to pick a movie to be watched at later date, highbrow movies were chosen far more often. Among movies picked four or more days in advance, over 70% were highbrow. People display a consistent bias to believe that they will have more time in the future than they have today. Specifically, there is a persistent belief among people that they are "unusually busy in the immediate future, but will become less busy shortly". However, the amount of time you have this week is generally representative of the time you have in future weeks. When people are estimating their time and when deciding if they will make a commitment, they anticipate more "time slack" in future weeks than the present week. Experiments by on this topic showed that people tend to discount investments of time more than money. They nicknamed this the "Yes...Damn!" effect because people tend to commit themselves to time-consuming activities like traveling to a conference under the false impression that they will be less busy in the future. See also Time preference References Bibliography Yeung, David W. K.; Petrosyan, Leon A. Subgame Consistent Economic Optimization: An Advanced Cooperative Dynamic Game Analysis (Static & Dynamic Game Theory: Foundations & Applications), Birkhäuser Boston; 2012. Further reading Stoerger, Jan (2006): The Time Consistency Problem - Monetary Policy Models Game theory Intertemporal economics