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

“Unanticipated obstacles sometimes contribute to follow-through failures, and self-control failures can also prevent success (e.g., Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Milkman, Chugh, & Bazerman, 2009; Read, Loewenstein, & Kalyanaraman, 1999; Read & Van Leeuwen, 1998; Rogers & Bazerman, 2008; Soman &…”

“Moreover, procrastination may result in work of inferior quality (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Steel, Brothen, &Wambach, 2001).”

“…tailored suggestion of what a student should do can be more effective at improving student engagement than purely informative interventions [44], and instituting a firm schedule of assignment deadlines leads to the improved performance over flexible student-selected assignment deadlines [56].”

“For example, engaging in self-imposed deadlines or precommitments, which involves costly consequences if the goal has not been attained, can be an effective strategy to protect goal commitment (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Schwartz et al., 2014).”

“The PTP is derived in part from research on precommitment, which suggests that those who commit to a certain behavioral norm will be more likely to follow it (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002).”

“Regarding decision control Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) find that individuals struggle to stick to self-imposed deadlines and perform better when a long task is split into equally spaced intervals with intermediate deliverables.”

“Combining (1) and (2), the agent is indifferent for q = q̃ where:”

“For example, Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) examine the effects of permitting each student to decide when to hand in assignments.”

“) In day-to-day experience, people place the ice cream out of sight, put money into a retirement account with withdrawal penalties, walk a different route to avoid seeing a store where there is temptation to buy something, or self-impose deadlines with self-imposed punishments (Ariely and Wertenbroch, 2002).”

“Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) analyze the use of deadlines as a commitment device.”

“The authors’ findings are consistent with previous literature showing mixed results on commitment devices’ effects on academic procrastination (Anderberg et al., 2017; Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Baker et al., 2016; Bisin & Hyndman, 2014; Burger et al., 2011; Patterson, 2018; Robinson et al., 2018).”

“Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) find that people recognize their self-control problems and try to combat them by committing to costly deadlines.”

“…Box 3992, Atlanta, GA 30302-3992, USA. laboratory experiments (Thaler, 1981), in individuals' decisions over exercising (Dellavigna and Malmendier, 2006) and doing homework assignments (Ariely and Wertenbroch, 2002).1 It also may be relevant to decisions over the energy efficiency of durable goods.”

“In addition, experiments from Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) suggest that self-imposed deadlines of individuals are not as effective as externally-imposed deadlines to overcome procrastination.”

“On the other, they appear to have unrealistic plans.”

“of deadlines (Ariely and Wertenbroch, 2002), the creation of specific goal setting plans (Gollwitzer and Brandstätter, 1997; Häfner et al.”

“…avoid temptations by using such means as precommitting to a specific behavior (and accepting sanctions if they break their commitment; e.g., Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Trope & Fishbach, 2000); likewise, individuals can anticipate tempting obstacles (e.g., the baked goods) and devalue…”

“Clarification of academic goals has proven effective in the management of academic procrastination in several studies (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Karas et al., 2009; Morisano et al., 2010; Rakes & Dunn, 2010).”

“Another explanation for why there was no difference in the reduction of procrastination between the three groups might be that all participants used self-imposed deadlines as precommitment mechanisms as they can help overcome procrastination (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002).”

“For example, Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) study a field experiment in which students are allowed to selfimpose deadlines on assignments.”

“This is a question examined by Ariely and Wertenbroch [116] in the context of student performance.”

“ividual’s behavior. Closely related to procrastination are issues of abandonment of long-time projects [O’Donoghue and Rabin 2008] and benefit of imposing a deadline in the context of task completion [Ariely and Wertenbroch 2002]. Other examples include models addressing attentiveness issues, e.g., where reduction of c…”

“…with previous research on procrastination, suggesting that students with firm deadlines on term papers perform better than those who are allowed to make their own deadlines (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002), a phenomenon that could be explained, at least in part, by deficits in future oriented thinking.”

“12 This is a similar test to the experiments by Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002), who find that regularly spaced and exogenously imposed deadlines improve the performance of subjects on various tasks relative to subjects with a single final deadline.”

“In a relevant study on procrastination, Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) found that participants used the tactic of setting their own early and binding deadlines for project completion as a way of establishing countervailing costs to procrastination.”

“For instance, Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) show in an experimental setting that externally imposed deadlines, such as an exam date, enhance performance more than selfimposed deadlines.”

“As for the latter, see, for example, Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) , Ashraf et al. (2006), Della Vigna and Malmendier (2006) and Thaler and Benartzi (2004).”

“Second, trait procrastination has demonstrated to result in difficulties with personal, social, and occupational functioning (e.g. Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Ferrari, Harriott, Evans, Lecik-Michna, & Wenger, 1997; Ferrari, Johnson, & McCown, 1995; Muszynski & Akamatsu, 1991; Rothblum, Solomon, &…”

“They also signed a commitment pledge during the meeting to try their best to achieve their daily physical activity duration (DPAD) goal, because pre-commitment has been found to motivate behavior change [40,41].”

“Recent experimental contributions on time preferences include Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002), Andersen et al. (2008) , Benhabib et al. (2010) and Andreoni and Sprenger (2012) .”

“Two in particular have proved popular: either diminish the attraction of the present by persuading people to pre-commit to saving at a later date (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Thaler & Benartzi, 2004); or encourage them to consider the benefits that can be accrued from diverse ways of spending in…”

“1.3 Self-regulation Research on temptation and self-control has shown that consumers who anticipate being tempted often prefer smaller choice sets that preclude or limit choices of tempting options (Ariely and Wertenbroch 2002; Rachlin and Green 1972; Schelling 1984).”

“Consistent with previous research by Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002), which suggests that individuals faced with unenjoyable tasks self-impose early deadlines to ‘‘get it over with’’ (see also Buehler et al.”

“…have attempted to motivate time-inconsistent agents is to provide commitment devices or contracts that restrict the possible actions of their future selves (e.g., Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002); Kaur et al. (2015); Ashaf et al. (2006); Giné et al. (2010); Duflo et al. (2011); Schilbach (2017)).”

“In one study, Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) allowed MIT students to select deadlines for three assignments they needed to complete throughout the semester.”

“Thus, we conducted another study with a proofreading task that had been used in a previous study on goals and procrastination (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002) to test our hypothesis that implementation intentions could prevent a decrease in participants’ self-set goal commitment, effort, and…”

“Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) demonstrate that externally imposed deadlines can improve task performance, and many others have described the consequences of procrastination and present bias in a range of settings.”

“In another study ( Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002 ), students who”

“20 Most directly related to our model are the experiments of Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) which studies deadlines in the context of academic tasks. The authors conducted two separate studies: one in which subjects had to write three papers during the course of the term for an executive education class, and one in whi…”

“Impulsive behavior is an extensively studied topic (e.g., Ainslie, 2001; Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Baumeister & Heatherton, 1996; Baumeister & Vohs, 2004; Cheema & Soman, 2006; Kardes, Cronley & Kim, 2006; Kivetz & Simonson, 2002a ; Prelec & Herrnsten, 1991; Schelling, 1980, 1984; Thaler, 1980;…”

“These include time-management and prioritization techniques to prevent avoidable stress (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002); meditation, deep breathing, and relaxation techniques (e.g., Mohan et al., 2011) to reduce unavoidable stress; and adopting healthy habits to counteract the negative effects of…”

“This was demonstrated in research by Ariely and Wertenbroch [21] in which students’ academic performance decreased when they accepted one distant deadline opposed to multiple nearby deadlines.”

“Long-term visions and future-oriented planning changed by commitment, goal setting, planning and incentives promise to improve decisions (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002[6]; Ashraf, Karlan & Yin, 2006; Beshears, Choi, Laibson, Madrian & Sakong, 2011; Gine, Karlan & Zinman, 2009[58]; Houser, Schunk, Winter & Xiao, 2010; Kau…”

“Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) explain that procrastination is a very real behavioural problem, and that people adopt various strategies, with various measures of success, in order to deal with their problems.”

“…evidence that people do have self-control problems of the sort implicated by hyperbolic discounting, that commitment mechanisms can be beneficial (Ariely and Wertenbroch 2002; Gine et al. 2009) and that some people are willing to effectively pay for commitment mechanisms to prevent time…”

“A field experiment conducted by Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) shows the problem of self-control is associated with lower task performance, even for high-achieving students.”

“…savings (Thaler and Benartzi, 2004; Ashraf, Karlan and Yin, 2006; Kast, Meier and Pomeranz, 2012; Dupas and Robinson, 2013), avoid procrastination (Ariely and Wertenbroch, 2002; Duflo, Kremer and Robinson, 2011), exercise more often (DellaVigna and Malmendier, 2006; Milkman, Minson and Volpp,…”

“Another important finding is that self-regulatory competences can be recognized very early and have a high impact on successful learning during the whole life.”

“One that is of particular interest is procrastination, a vice which has received much recent academic attention (e.g. Akerlof, 1991; Ariely and Wertenbroch, 2002; Sabini and Silver, 1982; O’Donoghue and Rabin, 1999; Read, 2001; Read, Lowenstein and Rabin, 1999; Schelling, 1984; Tice and Baumeister,…”

“Hypothesis 1 was informed by Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) studies.”

“However, more attention has been given to present bias as it relates to procrastinating behavior and suboptimal life outcomes (Ariely and Wertenbroch, 2002; Moffitt et al., 2011; Daly et al., 2015; Wang and Sloan, 2018).”