Pessimism and Overcommitment: An Online Experiment with Tempting YouTube Content

This paper explores 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 for a commitment device that removes the videos with some probability less than one, allowing us to compare their willingness to pay with realized material and psychological costs of temptation. A significant share of subjects overestimate their commitment demand, being overly pessimistic about their performance when tempted. However, the total realized ex-post disutility from undercommitment is greater than that from overcommitment. Torsten Söderberg Foundation Formas