  We build upon recent work [Kleinberg and Oren, 2014, Kleinberg et al., 2016,
2017] that considers present biased agents, who place more weight on costs they
must incur now than costs they will incur in the future. They consider a graph
theoretic model where agents must complete a task and show that present biased
agents can take exponentially more expensive paths than optimal. We propose a
theoretical model that adds competition into the mix -- two agents compete to
finish a task first. We show that, in a wide range of settings, a small amount
of competition can alleviate the harms of present bias. This can help explain
why biased agents may not perform so poorly in naturally competitive settings,
and can guide task designers on how to protect present biased agents from harm.
Our work thus paints a more positive picture than much of the existing
literature on present bias.
