 Present-bias, procrastination and deadlines in a field experimentAlberto Bisin and Kyle Hyndman Games and Economic Behavior, 2020, vol. 119, issue C, 339-357 Abstract: We study procrastination in the context of a field experiment involving students who must exert costly effort to complete certain tasks by a fixed deadline. We document a robust demand for commitment, in the form of self-imposed deadlines. On the other hand, deadlines do not increase completion rates in our experiment. Furthermore, while we find that present-bias is widespread in the sample, and present-biased students procrastinate in single task treatments, we find that they successfully manage to self-control in repeated task treatments. Finally, we find evidence that students do not set deadlines optimally and that deadlines may hurt them, due to various behavioral components of students' anticipation formation mechanisms; specifically, partial naïveté at the deadline setting stage and over-confidence about the ability to complete the task and to persevere on a task after a failed attempt. Keywords: Procrastination; Deadlines; Commitment; Experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:gamebe:v:119:y:2020:i:c:p:339-357 DOI: 10.1016/j.geb.2019.11.010 Access Statistics for this article Games and Economic Behavior is currently edited by E. Kalai More articles in Games and Economic Behavior from Elsevier |
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