In this blogpost we wish to highlight the following article as a candidate for a set of Robustness Reports:
Carrera, M., Royer, H., Stehr, M., Sydnor, J., & Taubinsky, D. (2021). Who chooses commitment? Evidence and welfare implications. The Review of Economic Studies, 89(3), 1205–1244. https://doi.org/10.1093/restud/rdab056
The abstract:
This article investigates whether offers of commitment contracts, in the form of self-imposed choice-set restrictions and penalties with no financial upside, are well-targeted tools for addressing self-control problems. In an experiment on gym attendance (N = 1,248), we examine take-up of commitment contracts and also introduce a separate elicitation task to identify actual and perceived time inconsistency. There is high take-up of commitment contracts for greater gym attendance, resulting in significant increases in exercise. However, this take-up is influenced both by noisy valuation and incorrect beliefs about one’s time inconsistency. Approximately half of the people who take up commitment contracts for higher gym attendance also take up commitment contracts for lower gym attendance. There is little association between commitment contract take-up and reduced-form and structural estimates of actual or perceived time inconsistency. A novel information treatment providing an exogenous shock to awareness of time inconsistency reduces demand for commitment contracts. Structural estimates of a model of quasi-hyperbolic discounting and gym attendance imply that offering our commitment contracts lowers consumer surplus and is less socially efficient than utilizing linear exercise subsidies that achieve the same average change in behaviour.
We suggest this article for robustness analyses due to its societal relevance. The original analysis found that people tend to overestimate their future gym attendance and that they are willing to sign commitment contracts imposing penalties for not meeting specific attendance goals. While such contracts increase gym attendance, individuals that sign such commitment contracts also tend to sign commitment contracts for decreased attendance. One reanalysis has already been conducted and confirmed the main results under reasonable changes in the analysis (see Institute for Replication, 2023).
The data are publicly available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5173081.
Author
Jari Holla
References
Carrera, M., Royer, H., Stehr, M., Sydnor, J., & Taubinsky, D. (2021). Who chooses commitment? Evidence and welfare implications. The Review of Economic Studies, 89(3), 1205–1244. https://doi.org/10.1093/restud/rdab056
Institute for Replication. (2023). Replication: “Carrera et al. (2022): Who Chooses Commitment? Evidence and Welfare Implications”. I4R Discussion Paper Series. https://osf.io/752q9/files/8rb5k
Featured image from GenAI