“Too Much Commitment? An Online Experiment With Tempting YouTube Content”, 2023-04 ():
Experimental subjects perform a tedious task while being tempted to procrastinate.
They are given an opportunity to remove the tempting YouTube videos (commitment).
We check whether willingness to pay for commitment matches losses when tempted.
While a substantial share appear to “over-commit”, under-commitment is more common.
We explore the possibility that demand for costly commitment may prove unnecessary and thus excessive. In an online experiment, subjects face a tedious productivity task where tempting YouTube videos invite procrastination. Subjects can pay [40% do] for a commitment device that removes the videos with probability less than one, allowing us to compare their willingness to pay with realized material and psychological costs of temptation.
…In our experiment, the commitment device removes YouTube video pop-ups and thumbnails that would otherwise be shown during a tedious online work task. Watching these YouTube videos means that the subject spends less time on the work task, thus reducing productivity and earnings. We picked this setting because of its obvious relevance—since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, an increasing number of individuals are working from home and experience the need to ignore distractions online (and offline).
…A large share of subjects do overestimate their commitment demand, being overly pessimistic about their performance when tempted. Even more subjects underestimate demand, and total realized losses from revealed under-commitment is greater than from over-commitment.
Thus, under-commitment dominates and is inconsistent with pure noise in stated demand.
[Keywords: commitment devices, pessimism, self-control, social media]