Soft commitment: a study on demand and compliance

ABSTRACT

This article explores the demand for soft, self-imposed commitment, and subsequent compliance behaviour, using a framed field study in a higher education setting. We find a substantial soft commitment demand and a remarkably high failure to comply with the chosen commitment. Students are more likely to demand soft commitment if they expect the task to be more time-consuming and their relative performance to be lower. Failure to comply is associated with previous grade and personality traits. We find no evidence that soft commitment affects grades.

KEYWORDS:

• Soft commitment
• deadlines
• procrastination
• education

JEL CLASSIFICATION:

• C93
• D91
• I21

Acknowledgements

We are truly grateful to Derrick Chong. Financial support from the Nuffield Foundation (grant EDU/41689) is gratefully acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Amador, Werning and Angeletos (2006) and Galperti (2015) study the optimal provision of commitment to individuals who value both commitment and flexibility.

² Ariely and Wertenbroch (2002) also find that students’ performance is better under externally imposed, evenly spaced deadlines than self-imposed ones, whereas Burger, Charness and Lynham (2011) find that externally imposed, intermediate deadlines lead to lower task completion rates.

³ The full survey can be found at https://www.dropbox.com/s/h787sgqltysfj30/questionnaire.pdf?dl=0. The consent form can be found at https://www.dropbox.com/s/ovz83b0etu03x5g/consent%20form.pdf?dl=0.

⁴ The students knew that neither the seminar leader nor the course lecturer would be informed about their self-chosen deadlines and other answers in the survey.

⁵ The students wrote their ID number on the survey, and their email address is given by their ID number, so their names and surnames were never known to the experimenters.

⁶ The students who did not fully complete the survey are not statistically different from the remaining sample in terms of relevant observable characteristics.

⁷ We also explored a tobit model, but there was not enough variation in the commitment demand.

⁸ Since the course was run for the first time when we ran our study, it is not possible to use earlier cohorts.

Additional information

Funding

Financial support from the Nuffield Foundation [grant number: EDU/41689] is gratefully acknowledged.