Doctoral Dissertation Research in Economics: Missing Commitment: Uncertainty, Flexibility and Relationships

缺乏承诺：不确定性、灵活性和关系 偏向当下的决策可能会导致各种负面结果，例如拖延或储蓄不足。承诺机制是调整源于当下偏见的低效行为的自然方式，但我们很少看到承诺的实施。最近的一系列经济文献集中于解释这种“缺失的承诺”。该项目背后的关键思想是，关于一个人的自我控制力和她未来可能面临的成本的不确定性可能会导致低承诺率。在这项研究中，我试图证明人们对自己的自我控制能力不确定，这种不确定性解释了承诺接受率低的原因，灵活的承诺手段可能有助于增加承诺的接受率，而关系成分可能使灵活的承诺手段更有价值和更有效。这项研究的结果可以帮助提出政策建议，提高承诺手段的采用率和有效性，以减轻因当前偏见而产生的低效行为。研究结果可应用于多个领域，包括储蓄、健康、教育和培训。此外，我们发现发展中国家存在非正式承诺，这些国家在实施正式承诺手段方面可能存在障碍。通过隔离使非正式承诺有效的关系机制，我们可以帮助在更多样化的环境中实施可行的承诺机制。在第一个实验中，我偏离了当前的实验文献，并假设人们对他们的当前偏见有分布信念，而不是点信念。我证明，这种不确定性可以解释为什么一个人的 ß 引出点信念表明他应该承诺，但可能理性地选择不承诺。通过实验室实验，我试图确定人们对他们的自我控制有分配信念，引出他们的分配信念的形状，并检查受试者是否？信念与他们的承诺是一致的。我们所认为的缺失承诺，实际上可能是由于自我控制能力不确定而不愿承诺。在第二个实验中，我测试了成本的不确定性是否会阻碍传统的、不灵活的承诺机制的采用，以及在承诺选项中添加依赖于国家的灵活性是否会鼓励采用。此外，我引入了一种处理方法，在这种处理方法中，如果我们引入关系组件（非正式承诺工具的主要元素），我会衡量承诺工具的价值是否更高。我隔离并测试了一种机制，通过该机制，关系承诺可能会有效。该提案的智力价值在于它为最近关于缺失承诺的文献做出了贡献。此外，确定人们对自我控制具有分配信念，对于我们如何计算承诺价值以及更普遍地如何模拟当前偏见的决策问题具有重要意义。我通过允许不确定的信念引入一种更普遍、可能更具描述性的天真形式来扩展文献。

Missing Commitment: Uncertainty, flexibility, and relationships Present-biased decision making may result in various negative outcomes, such as procrastination or under-saving. Commitment devices are a natural way to adjust inefficient behavior that stems from present-bias, yet we see very little take-up of commitment. A recent vein of economic literature focuses on explaining this "missing commitment". The key idea behind this project is that uncertainty, both about a person?s self-control and about costs she may face in the future, might be driving low commitment take-up. In this research, I attempt to establish that people are uncertain about their self-control, that uncertainty explains low commitment take-up, that flexible commitment devices may help increase commitment take-up, and that a relational component may make flexible commitment devices more valuable and effective. The results of this research can help recommend policies that will improve the take-up and efficacy of commitment devices to mitigate inefficient behavior that arises from present bias. The results have applications in several areas, including savings, health, education, and training. Further, we see that informal commitment exists in developing countries where there may be barriers to implementing formal commitment devices. By isolating a relational mechanism that makes informal commitment effective, we can help implement feasible commitment devices in more diverse settings. In the first experiment, I deviate from the current experimental literature and hypothesize that people have distributional beliefs about their present-bias instead of point-beliefs. I show that this uncertainty can explain why a person whose elicited point-belief of ß suggests that he should commit but may rationally choose not to commit. Using a lab experiment, I attempt to establish that people have distributional beliefs about their self-control, elicit the shape of their distributional beliefs, and examine whether subjects? beliefs are consistent with their commitment take-up. What we deem missing commitment may actually be a reluctance to commit due to uncertain self-control. In the second experiment, I test whether uncertainty about costs prevents take-up of traditional, inflexible, commitment devices and whether adding state-dependent flexibility to commitment options encourages take-up. Further, I introduce a treatment in which I measure whether the value of a commitment device is higher if we introduce a relational component, a main element of informal commitment devices. I isolate and test a mechanism by which relational commitment may be effective. The intellectual merit of this proposal is that it contributes to the recent literature on missing commitment. Additionally, establishing that people have distributional beliefs about their self-control has important implications for how we calculate commitment value and more generally how we model present-biased decision problems. I extend the literature by introducing a more general and possibly more descriptive form of naivety by allowing for uncertain beliefs.