Abstract
This paper studies how self-control limitations and individuals’ beliefs about those limitations relate to behavior and outcomes in a high-stakes intertemporal decision environment. We combine a bespoke survey of active online gamblers with detailed transaction-level data covering 19 months of observed gambling activity. The survey elicits individuals’ intended loss limits and expectations about future gambling, allowing us to identify gamblers who have self-control problems and classify them as time-consistent, naïve, or sophisticated within a standard framework of time-inconsistent preferences.
We document systematic differences in gambling behavior and gambling-related outcomes across these self-control types. We further explore how awareness of self-control problems relates to observed behavior and outcomes, and examine the role of experience, recall of past outcomes, and responsiveness to personalized feedback in shaping beliefs about self-control. Finally, using randomized intervention that provided feedback on problem gambling risk, we assess whether increased salience of gambling-related information affects subsequent behavior. While feedback does not improve adherence to loss goals on average, it benefits a subset of high-risk gamblers.