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

“One such instance is when the boundary task serves as a deadline, or when the target task must be completed prior to the start of the scheduled task (Ariely and Wertenbroch 2002).”

“The finding that precommitment can be facilitated with brain stimulation may be of relevance for the treatment of psychiatric disorders involving self-control problems (Kirby et al., 1999; Bickel and Marsch, 2001; Baumeister and Vonasch, 2015;).”

“Other researchers have studied overconfidence and naiveté about future self-control, such as when people procrastinate (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; O’Donoghue & Rabin, 1999) or “pay not to go to the gym” by purchasing long-term memberships that they underuse (DellaVigna & Malmendier, 2006).”

“example, Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) noted that students were willing to self-impose deadlines to overcome procrastination even when failure to meet the deadlines involved penalties.”

“This is noteworthy as self-imposed deadlines by students has been used to identify sophisticated procrastinators (e.g. Ariely and Wertenbroch, 2002; Bisin and Hyndman, 2018); our result suggests that these students either do not have quasi-hyperbolic preferences or that they must foresee a…”

“Follow-up not applicable: The outcome of whether the sampling kit was returned cannot be differentiated from loss to follow-up in this trial. expiry date, urging action in the moment rather than an ‘I’ll do it later’ mind-set [22,23].”

“…intertemporal allocation of effort, a non-fungible carrier of utility for which the resulting utility flow can be dated precisely.4 Experiments by Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002), Augenblick et al. (2015), Kaur et al. (2015) and Bisin and Hyndman (2018) all find substantial present bias in the…”

“…ranging from socializing with visitors to watching TV. 26 Theoretically, this self-imposed modification can take two forms: (i) adding punishment for missing targets, 27 which enhances the subjective value of the action; or (ii) restricting choice alternatives, which reduces the opportunity costs.”

“The bounds in (10) and (11) depend on the parameters returned from the linear program, and these might not be unique.”

“Deadlines are an effective tool for overcoming procrastination (Ariely and Wertenbroch 2002), and this specific deadline was chosen because it both marked the initiation of additional collection efforts across conditions and it could be viewed as a more concrete goal than asking someone to pay…”

“…apply pre-commitment strategies (i.e., commit in advance to a certain plan of action, such as using deadlines for task completion; see for instance Ariely and Wertenbroch, 2002) to increase their future orientation, an effort which typically requires self-control (Baumeister, 2002; Houben and…”

“Securing the commitment ahead of the donation ameliorates the sense of financial loss (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Loewenstein & Prelec, 1992), controlling for the endowment effect (Kahneman, Knetsch, & Thaler, 1991) whereby possessions (including money) are imbued with additional subjective value,…”

“According to the ego-depletion theory, both performing an effortful cognitive task and controlling one’s emotions may drain off the same pool of inner limited cognitive resources, and a high level of stress can predict poor subsequent self-regulatory behavior [54,55], and those who undesirably self-control themselves…”

“Compared with work tasks, academic tasks usually have longer periods, are less specific, and place greater emphasis on autonomy, so students are more likely to rely on external or self-imposed deadlines to improve performance (Ariely and Wertenbroch, 2002).”

“Prompting clinicians and patients to state their implementation intentions helps increase motivation (Central Illustration) (48,49).”

“These results suggest evenly spaced deadlines do not increase completion rates, a finding that seems to be at odds with the work of Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002).”

“Limiting access to want options (e.g., installing antiprocrastination software) may also help keep long-term goals salient via managing the personal environment of the media user (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002).”

“…& Rodriguez, 1989), resist temptations (Fudenberg & Levine, 2006), overcome impulses (Hofmann, Friese, & Strack, 2009), avoid procrastination (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002), or override short-term goals that block long-term goals (Fishbach & Shah, 2006; Hofmann et al., 2009; Muraven &…”

“…this is more effective if students set themselves objectives and enter into ‘commitment contracts’ with others (in this case it could be their peers and tutors) in order to motivate themselves so they become less dependent and develop more agency (Ariely and Wertenbroch 2002; Ariely 2009).”

“Given the general propensity not to revisit deferred decisions (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002) this could have important implications for volunteer recruitment .”

“Difficulty of assignments on the other hand has been found to be positively related to academic procrastination, which can be explained through the underlying mechanism of controlled motivation (Ackerman & Gross, 2005; Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Jiang et al., 2018).”

“Another example of a nudge is self-commitment, which serves as a promise to oneself and therefore increases the likelihood of overcoming self-control problems, even when there are no costs associated with deviations from the commitment [46].”

“Commitment devices have been shown to be effective at changing behaviors, such as curbing procrastination, saving more for retirement, and donating to charity [5, 8, 54].”

“…as smaller plates, bank accounts that are inaccessible until a predetermined future date, or fines that arise when they fail to achieve their goals (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Ashraf, Karlan, & Yin, 2006; Bryan, Karlan, & Nelson, 2010; Royer, Stehr, & Sydnor, 2015; Laibson, 1997; Wansink &…”

“Studies from psychology partially support this: it was found that more frequent deadlines reduces the likelihood of being late from the final deadline [13].”

“Such findings are indeed supported by psychological studies showing how deadlines help to avoid procrastination and improve productivity and quality, e.g. [8] .”

“We are given to procrastination and we have a tendency to continue the status quo (Samuelson & Zeckhauser 1988; Ariely & Wertenbroch 2002).”

“Consumers may also accept the commitment because they recognise they have limited willpower (Ariely and Wertenbroch 2002; O’Donoghue and Rabin 2001), choosing to constrain their behaviour.”

“Yet, social sciences and the medical field is especially rich in various debi-asing strategies we have not addressed in this position paper, e.g., strategies based on pre-commitement (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Lambe et al., 2016).”

“A second account from the neoclassical economic literature examines a host of related choice problems including the failure to save money, over-consumption and procrastination (see Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Bryan, Karlan & Nelson, 2010 for behavioral examples).”

“Procrastination to complete a task is reduced when short time windows are provided as specific deadlines (28,29).”

“…the efficacy of self- versus externally imposed deadlines, with mixed results: while some have found that self-imposed deadlines are more effective at ensuring performance (Roberts and Semb 1990), others have shown that externally imposed deadlines are more effective (Ariely and Wertenbroch 2002).”

“There is good evidence that the common underlying factor accounting for procrastination behaviour is poor self-regulation (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Brownlow & Reasinger, 2000; Chu & Choi, 2005; Ferrari, 2001; Howell & Watson, 2007; Klassen et al. 2008a; Rabin, Fogel & Nutter-Upham, 2011;…”

“Our findings serve as a warning for marketers who try to induce greater motivation by giving more flexibility to consumers and suggest that restrictions may be more productive (e.g., Ariely and Wertenbroch 2002; Kivetz and Simonson 2003; Wertenbroch 1998).”

“…breaking an overarching goal into a series of more granular subgoals produces more frequent and immediate deadlines, and more frequent and immediate deadlines help combat procrastination (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002; Janakiraman, & Ordóñez, 2012; Lieberman et al., 2021; Zhu et al., 2019).”

“For example, 39 Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) in a series of experiments showed that students at MIT did not 40 set themselves meaningful and helpful deadlines in order to overcome procrastination and that 41 their self-imposed deadlines did not contribute to the optimization of their academic…”

“Psychology research on precommitment suggests that those who commit to a certain behavioral norm will be more likely to follow it (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002).”

“If in a given informative context, waiting for the deadline before deciding may seem like a rational strategy, according to social psychology (Ariely and Wertenbroch, 2002), with the expiry of a deadline, the balance between benefits and costs of bystander behaviour tends to change.”

“4For behavioral evidence of partial naivete, see Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) and DellaVigna and Malmendier (2006) that analyze the relationship among commitment, deadline, and performance in the context of writing papers and the behavior of health-club members, respectively.”

“This type is tied to the manner in which students approach their study assignments, the way they use learning strategies and the results of their learning (Ariely and Wertenbroch 2002).”

“Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) found that people are willing to create self-imposed deadlines to help overcome procrastination.”

“Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) gave students an option to self-impose deadlines for assigned tasks and found the majority took advantage of this commitment option, performing the tasks better, on average, than a control group. Many studies have explored demand for commitment in savings behavior. Ashraf et al. (2006) ga…”

“…college-age adults were willing to self-impose deadlines to overcome procrastination, even when those deadlines were binding and costly (i.e., each day the assignment was turned in after the self-imposed deadline, students received a 1% penalty on their overall grade; Ariely and Wertenbroch, 2002).”

“Finally, there is a literature documenting that lifestyle and self-control affect academic performance (Ariely and Wertenbroch 2002; Duckworth and Seligman 2005; Short et al. 2013; Kim and Seo 2015; Donnelly et al. 2016; Hysing et al. 2016).”

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“However, relying on intrinsic motivation alone cannot reliably predict the avoidance of procrastination, as self-imposed deadlines are first, not as effective as external deadlines and second, many students fail to set selfimposed deadlines optimally (Ariely & Wertenbroch, 2002).”

“Results by Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) from a series of experiments on college students showed that we recognise that we have self-control problems, and attempt to control them by setting costly deadlines.”

“Thus, casinos may offer selfexclusion programs (Harford 2008, 61); instructors may enforce interim deadlines selected by students (Ariely & Wertenbroch 2002), and enterprises like the recently formed StickK.com can offer to channel money away from those who break their self-imposed commitments.”

“1 Present-biased preferences have been shown to produce negative consequences on human capital investment decisions (Ariely and Wertenbroch, 2002; De Paola and Scoppa, 2015; Mischel et al., 1989; Wong, 2008). Doherty (2006) shows that procrastination is a predictor of dropping out or failing to complete an online cour…”