| 来源类型 | Working Paper |
| 规范类型 | 报告 |
| DOI | 10.3386/w22987 |
| 来源ID | Working Paper 22987 |
| Procrastination in the Workplace: Evidence from the U.S. Patent Office | |
| Michael D. Frakes; Melissa F. Wasserman | |
| 发表日期 | 2016-12-26 |
| 出版年 | 2016 |
| 语种 | 英语 |
| 摘要 | Despite much theoretical attention to the concept of procrastination and much exploration of this phenomenon in laboratory settings, there remain few empirical investigations into the practice of procrastination in real world contexts, especially in the workplace. In this paper, we attempt to fill these gaps by exploring procrastination among U.S. patent examiners. We find that nearly half of examiners’ first substantive reports are completed immediately prior to the operable deadlines. Moreover, we find a range of additional empirical markers to support that this “end-loading” of reviews results from a model of procrastination rather than various alternative time-consistent models of behavior. In one such approach, we take advantage of the natural experiment afforded by the Patent Office’s staggered implementation of its telecommuting program, a large-scale development that we theorize might exacerbate employee self-control problems due to the ensuing reduction in direct supervision. Supporting the procrastination theory, we estimate an immediate spike in application end-loading and other indicia of procrastination upon the onset of telecommuting. Finally, contributing to a growing empirical literature over the efficiency of the patent examination process, we assess the consequences of procrastination for the quality of the reviews completed by the affected examiners. This analysis suggests that the primary harm stemming from procrastination is delay in the ultimate application process, with rushed reviews completed at deadlines resulting in the need for revisions in subsequent rounds of review. Our findings imply that nearly 1/6 of the annual growth in the Agency’s much-publicized backlog may be attributable to examiner procrastination. |
| 主题 | Microeconomics ; Behavioral Economics ; Labor Economics ; Other ; Law and Economics ; Development and Growth ; Innovation and R& ; D |
| URL | https://www.nber.org/papers/w22987 |
| 来源智库 | National Bureau of Economic Research (United States) |
| 引用统计 | |
| 资源类型 | 智库出版物 |
| 条目标识符 | http://119.78.100.153/handle/2XGU8XDN/580661 |
| 推荐引用方式 GB/T 7714 | Michael D. Frakes,Melissa F. Wasserman. Procrastination in the Workplace: Evidence from the U.S. Patent Office. 2016. |
| 条目包含的文件 | ||||||
| 文件名称/大小 | 资源类型 | 版本类型 | 开放类型 | 使用许可 | ||
| w22987.pdf（721KB） | 智库出版物 | 限制开放 | CC BY-NC-SA | 浏览 | ||
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