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

缺少承诺：不确定性、灵活性和人际关系当前偏向的决策可能会导致各种负面结果，如拖延或储蓄不足。承诺手段是一种自然的方式来调整源于现在偏见的低效行为，但我们很少看到承诺的接受。最近的一系列经济学文献集中于解释这种“承诺缺失”。这个项目背后的关键思想是，不确定性，无论是关于一个人？她的自制力和对未来可能面临的成本的担忧，可能会导致低承诺的接受。在这项研究中，我试图建立，人们不确定自己的自我控制，不确定性解释低承诺占用，灵活的承诺手段可能有助于增加承诺占用，关系的组成部分可能使灵活的承诺手段更有价值和有效。这项研究的结果可以帮助建议政策，将提高承诺手段的采用和有效性，以减轻目前的偏见所产生的低效行为。研究结果在储蓄、卫生、教育和培训等多个领域都有应用。此外，我们看到，非正式的承诺存在于发展中国家，在那里可能有障碍，以执行正式的承诺手段。通过隔离一个关系机制，使非正式承诺有效，我们可以帮助实施可行的承诺手段在更多样化的设置。在第一个实验中，我偏离了目前的实验文献，并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引出点信念的建议，他应该承诺，但可能理性地选择不承诺。使用实验室实验，我试图建立人们对他们的自我控制的分布信念，引出他们的分布信念的形状，并检查是否受试者？信念与他们的承诺是一致的。我们所认为的缺乏承诺实际上可能是由于不确定的自我控制而不愿意承诺。在第二个实验中，我测试成本的不确定性是否会阻止采取传统的，不灵活的，承诺的设备，以及是否增加国家依赖的灵活性，承诺选项鼓励采取。此外，我介绍了一种治疗方法，在其中我衡量的承诺手段的价值是否更高，如果我们引入一个关系的组成部分，非正式的承诺手段的主要元素。我隔离和测试的关系承诺可能是有效的机制。这一建议的学术价值在于，它有助于最近关于缺失承诺的文献。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值以及更一般地说，我们如何模拟存在偏见的决策问题具有重要意义。我通过引入一种更一般的、可能更具有描述性的天真形式来扩展文献，这种天真形式允许不确定的信念。

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.