RETRACTED: Procrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Control by Precommitment

“The finding that consumers cognitively transfer control to an external source contributes to research on precommitment (e.g., Ariely and Wertenbroch 2002).”

“, Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002), Burger, Charness, and Lynham (2011), have focused on students’ homework activity. We design and conduct a framed field experiment in which students must exert costly effort to perform a certain number of tasks by a fixed deadline for a monetary payment after completion of each task. Su…”

“Psychological experiments have shown that aggressive intermediate deadlines can improve outcome quality and individuals’ time management [5].”

“Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) show that students may choose to commit themselves to homework deadlines.”

“Older work on the concept of pre-commitment similarly promises effective self-regulation without the need to overcome conflict in the moment (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Crockett et al., 2013) .”

“In order to promote his grades, Mark is given the ability to determine his own deadlines for a course, as done in a study by Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002).”

“Finally, there is robust evidence that people do have self-control problems of the sort implicated by hyperbolic discounting, and that commitment mechanisms can reduce procrastination and improve people’s task performance (Ariely and Wertenbroch 2002; Gine et al. 2009).”

“To explore self-control problems, Ariely and Wertenbroch examined students’ performance in an academic course based on exposure to internal or external restrictions.(70,75) Specifically, in various substudies, students were asked to submit class assignments in 3 distinct ways: 1) self-imposed deadlines, ie, students s…”

“Because goal-directed behavior regulates process, it time-inconsistent preferences to achieve desired outcomes (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002).”

“Students can set self-imposed early deadlines to avoid procrastination (Ariely and Wertenbroch 2002), and smokers can buy smaller packages of cigarettes and other vices to limit how much they consume later (Wertenbroch 1998).”

“First, it is an important precursor of task and leadership performance (e.g., Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Ashford & Tsui, 1991; Tangney et al., 2004).”

“Prior work that explored conflict resolution found, for example, that precommitments (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002) and cognitive construal of goals and temptations (Fujita, Trope, Liberman, & Levin-Sagi, 2006; Mischel, 1996) influence successful resolution, once the person has identified a problem.”

“do indeed exhibit elements of both sophistication and naivete: Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) analyze people’s choice of deadlines for papers and subsequent performance on those papers, and DellaVigna and Malmendier (forthcoming) analyze people’s choice of health-club memberships (per-use fees vs. monthly fees vs. year…”

“max τ≥t Et [Dn(t, τ) (X (τ)− I)] , (3)”

“Moreover, the tendency to procrastinate at work may be reduced by motivating oneself and shutting out distractions (Steel, 2007), setting goals or deadlines (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002), and sleeping well (Kühnel, Bledow, & Feuerhahn, 2016).”

“To attain remote goals, people implement a variety of strategies that encourage them to get through temporary strains (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Fishbach & Trope, 2005; Gollwitzer, 1993; Gollwitzer & Brandstätter, 1997; Myrseth & Fishbach, 2009).”

“However, intervention studies that have targeted academic procrastination are still limited in number (e.g., Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Gieselmann & Pietrowsky, 2016, Toker & Avci, 2015; Tuckman, 1998; Tuckman & Schouwenburg, 2004).”

“Indeed, the exercise of self-control often involves precommitting oneself to a course of action that is difficult to pursue but that offers delayed, extrinsic benefits (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Wertenbroch, 1998).”

“The demand for commitment devices has been documented in the domains of completing homework assignments for university courses (Ariely and Wertenbroch, 2002), quitting cigarette smoking (Gine, Karlan, and Zinman, 2010), avoiding repeated temptations in a laboratory environment (Houser et al.,…”

“A telling example refers to deadlines that various people, including academics, impose on themselves to avoid procrastination even when missing them entails substantial costs (Thaler, 1980; Ariely and Wertenbroch, 2002).”

“In this respect, students’ self-regulation tendencies become important variables to address in understanding behavioural procrastination (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Howell, Watson, Powell, & Buro, 2006; Klassen, Krawchuk, & Rajani, 2008).”

“Also, the treatment group may benefit from externally imposed homework deadlines that help students to avoid procrastination, a result consistent with Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002). A second potential explanation for the better performance of the treatment group is that homework assignments provide students with more…”

“DOI: 10.1086/649912”

“Using (3) and inequality R β̂δb β̂δb−p(δb − c)dG(c) ≤ h (1− β̂)δb+ p i · h G(β̂δb)−G(β̂δb− p) i , we prove the following Proposition.”

“Three items of the Irrational Procrasti-nation Scale (Steel, 2010; Svartdal, 2017) were included to reflect the procrastination factor of self-control (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Steel, 2010).”

“Dan Ariely, its cofounder, is renowned for his experimental research measuring the inefficiency of how people allocate their time (see, e.g., Ariely and Wertenbroch 2002).”

“While scheduling is a good time management strategy (Ariely and Wertenbroch 2002), it provides no direction for substantive studying actions (learning) and has potential to lead to procrastination.”

“Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) suggest that self–imposed deadlines, enforceable by third parties, may be effective commitment mechanisms.”

“…laboratory and simulation studies have presented evidence consistent with consumers’ exercising self-control (Wertenbroch, Soman, & Nunes, 2001; Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Laibson, Repetto, & Tobacman, 2003; Fernandez-Villaverde & Mukherji, 2006), studies using data and situations not…”

“One study from higher education (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002) has demonstrated a demand for, and a positive effect of, precommitment devices that aim to affect student effort and behaviors on out-of-class assignments.”

“…superstitious behaviours (Aeschleman, Rosen and Williams, 2003; Keinan, 2002), management (Ammerman and Hersen, 2001), the concept of commitment (Ariely and Wertenbroch, 2002), health issues (Bickel and Vuchinich, 2000; Bouton, 2000; Gottfried, O’Doherty and Dolan, 2002; Johnson and Brinker,…”

“The Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) study is, of course, an example of the challenge of self-control and its failures.”

“This type of effort distortion can result in poor outcomes for a project, as seen in prior work (Ariely and Wertenbroch 2002, Cadena et al. 2011) and in our own studies of industrial projects discussed below.”

“…purely faculty-set deadlines, students could have a say in choosing their own, allowing for greater autonomy and better schedule management [see ( 81 )]. extensions Students could be given a number of “extension days” to use at their discretion over the semester, removing subjectivity from the…”

“Such devices represent “smoking guns” that cannot be explained by any time-consistent preferences (for example, Wertenbroch, 1998, Ariely and Wertenbroch, 2002).”

“Specifically, characteristics of the online course environment, such as anonymity (e.g. Kast et al., 2012) and unstructured scheduling (e.g. Ariely and Wertenbroch, 2002), make students prone to behaviors that could limit their ability to achieve their course goals.”

“The posterior belief φ∗ (t) is formed according to Bayesian updating for a given strategy profile as in (3).”

“Indeed, much research over the past decade shows that people are myopic and impatient ( Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Zauberman, 2003).”

“2006; Ariely and Wertenbroch 2002; DellaVigna and Malmendier 2006; Benartzi and Thaler 2004). The first contribution of this paper is to present empirical evidence on the degree to which the preference for commitment is common. Second, while choice reversal over time may originate from inconsistent time preferences, i…”

“One behavioral strategy binds decisions in advance to promote more desirable, long-term behavior that aligns with self-control goals (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002).”

“Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) run experiments in which students are allowed to preemptively set due dates for school assignments, and find that students are willing to self- impose costly deadlines.”

“People also impose on themselves penalties for failing to act according to their long-term goals (Trope & Fishbach, 2000), such as when students are willing to self-impose costly deadlines to overcome procrastination (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002).”

“Furthermore, we cannot discern whether these behaviors reflect rational or time-inconstant preferences, such as procrastination or self-control problems (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Vohs & Heatherton, 2000).”

“When people engage in a focal task, they often self-impose a deadline for completing it (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Colby & Chapman, 2013).”

“Findings from several studies highlighted that precommitment is an efficient strategy to resist short-term temptations in order to achieve long-term goals (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Ashraf, Karlan, & Yin, 2006; Giné, Karlan, & Zinman, 2010; Schwartz et al., 2014; Wertenbroch, 1998).”

“A number of studies suggest that binding deadlines can lead to desired behavior in other contexts such as handing in homework, the use of coupons or when filling out a survey for money (Tversky & Shafir 1992, Ariely & Wertenbroch 2002, Shu & Gneezy 2010, McBride et al. 2013).”

“…is not met at the future date, individuals feel more obligated to stick to the ‘‘should’’ decisions to which they had previously agreed, even if the ‘‘want’’ decision becomes more attractive as the time of the decision draws nearer (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Ashraf, Karlan, & Yin, 2006).”

“number of studies that show that people tend to procrastinate ( Ariely and Wertenbroch, 2002;”

“Procrastinators commonly set deadlines, but research has found that external deadlines may be more effective than self-imposed ones (Ariely and Wertenbroch, 2002).”

“the principle of time discounting, whereby individuals perceive greater value in more immediately available benefits compared with future longer-term consequences of behavior (Ariely and Wertenbroch 2002).”

“An example is the influential report (Arrow et al., 1993) by a panel of academic economists on how to best elicit and use “contingent valuation” survey measures to establish reasonable prices for non-market-traded goods and services (such as clean air). They specifically “emphasize[d] the urgency of studying the sensi…”

“Also, the experimenters (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Lamwers & Jazwinski, 1989; Morris et al., 1978; Reiser, 1984; Wesp, 1986) employed between-groups experimental designs to evaluate the effects of their intervention, thus limiting conclusions as to the effects of the interventions on individual…”

“Finally, Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) show that performance is better under self-imposed early deadlines than under externally imposed late deadlines – which invite the highest degree of procrastination, measured as performancediminishing delays.”

“Thaler and Shefrin (1981) found strong evidence indicating that much like in a team production effort, people rationally choose to impose self-constraints on their behavior to overcome the limits of their myopic and ultimately inefficient behavior (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Vanberg, 2002).”

“If allowed to choose, they do not leave themselves sufficient time at the end of the semester because they incorrectly estimate the amount of time the assignments will require (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002).”

“Leaving the ex-ante choice to the savers can be harmful because people may find it difficult to accurately predict their future behaviour and set their optimal deadlines (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; John, 2015).”

“Heber M. Delgado-Medrano ideas42 Antoinette Schoar Massachusetts Institute of Technology 147_loan_officer_procrastination_april_11.pdf”

“5 See Thaler (1980), Thaler and Shefrin (1981), Schelling (1992), Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002), Wertenbroch (1998, 2002).”