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

经济学博士论文研究：缺失的承诺：不确定性、灵活性和关系

• 批准号: 1658556
• 负责人: Charles Sprenger
• 金额: $ 1.94万
• 依托单位: University of California-San Diego
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2017-03-01 至 2019-02-28
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1658556&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Doctoral; Dissertation; Research; Economics; Missing

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.

缺少承诺：不确定性、灵活性和关系。现在偏向的决策可能会导致各种负面结果，比如拖延或储蓄不足。承诺机制是调节低效行为的自然方式，这些低效行为源于对当下的偏见，但我们很少看到承诺机制。最近的一批经济学文献聚焦于解释这种“缺失的承诺”。这个项目背后的关键思想是不确定性，关于一个人？她的自我控制能力和对未来可能面临的成本的担忧，可能是导致承诺率较低的原因。在本研究中，我试图建立人们对自我控制的不确定性，不确定性解释了低承诺接受率，灵活的承诺手段可能有助于增加承诺接受率，关系成分可能使灵活的承诺手段更有价值和有效。本研究的结果有助于提出政策建议，以提高承诺装置的使用率和有效性，以减轻由当前偏见引起的低效率行为。研究结果可应用于储蓄、健康、教育和培训等多个领域。此外，我们看到非正式承诺存在于发展中国家，这些国家在实施正式承诺手段方面可能存在障碍。通过分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手段。在第一个实验中，我偏离了目前的实验文献，假设人们对他们的现在偏见有分布信念，而不是点信念。我表明，这种不确定性可以解释为什么一个人的点信念（point-belief）暗示他应该承诺，但可能理性地选择不承诺。通过一个实验室实验，我试图建立人们对自我控制的分配信念，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，实际上可能是由于不确定的自我控制而不愿做出承诺。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、不灵活的承诺手段的采用，以及在承诺选项中增加与状态相关的灵活性是否会鼓励采用。此外，我介绍了一种处理方法，如果我们引入关系成分，即非正式承诺手段的主要元素，我将测量承诺手段的价值是否更高。我分离并测试一种机制，通过这种机制，关系承诺可能是有效的。这一建议的学术价值在于，它对最近关于缺失承诺的文献有所贡献。此外，建立人们对自我控制的分布信念对我们如何计算承诺价值以及更普遍地如何模拟当前偏见决策问题具有重要意义。我通过引入一种更一般的，可能更具描述性的天真形式来扩展文献，允许不确定的信念。