CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Batmanov, Alisher |
|---|---|
| Title | Why Don't You Try Harder? A Model of Effort Choice in Depression |
| Summary | I develop a simple model of effort choice for a person in a state of depression, who struggles to mobilize herself to carry out even the most elemental tasks under the impact of depressive anhedonia. This framework incorporates two key features exhibited by depressed individuals: perceiving the task at stake to be overly challenging to perform and diminishing the value of its reward characterized by the lack of motivational incentive. Even though taking up an activity such as exercising at the gym, reading a book or painting a picture in fact helps mitigate her perception of the task's excessive difficulty, a projection-biased person in depression fails to fully anticipate this and correctly evaluate the soothing effect that engaging in these tasks can bring while clouded by her current depressive state. As a consequence, she suboptimally ends up exerting too little effort or withdrawing from the task at all. To test these theoretical predictions, I ran an online experiment in which I elicited participants' willingness to work on real-effort tasks as well as the presence and severity of depressive symptoms using a widely used self-reported questionnaire. Subjects with more pronounced depressive symptoms chose to do 0.1-0.3 fewer tasks and exhibited a lower projection bias equivalent to 0.5-1.0 tasks, or 7.5-15%. |
| Supervisor | Kaufmann, Marc |
| Department | Economics MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/batmanov_alisher.pdf |
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