It’s the Effort That Counts: The Effect of Self-Control on Goal Progress Perceptions

Self-Control and Optimal Goals: A Theoretical Analysis

Consumers set goals to achieve a variety of objectives such as losing weight, saving for retirement, and achieving better health. A large body of literature in psychology and consumer behavior shows that goals can help consumers achieve these objectives. However, there is almost no research that examines how we should set optimal goals. The purpose of this paper is to develop a parsimonious framework that examines how goals can help performance and how we should set optimal goals. We use the literature on hyperbolic discounting to model these issues. Our results show that goals can often increase performance but can also sometimes encourage procrastination. We show that some goals are worse than having no goals, even when the goals are achieved and the consumer exerts more effort because of the goal. We also find that the presence of goals can lead to myopic consumers behaving as if they were hyperopic. Our results also show that the most difficult goals should be assigned to consumers with moderate levels of motivation and self-control problems. We also find that it is sometimes optimal to set goals that are never achieved.

Time-inconsistent Preferences and Consumer Self-Control

Abstract Why do consumers sometimes act against their own better judgment, engaging in behavior that is often regretted after the fact and that would have been rejected with adequate forethought? More generally, how do consumers attempt to maintain self-control in the face of time-inconsistent preferences? This article addresses consumer impatience by developing a decision-theoretic model based on reference points. The model explains how and why consumers experience sudden increases in desire for a product, increases that can result in the temporary overriding of long-term preferences. Tactics that consumers use to control their own behavior are also discussed. Consumer self-control is framed as a struggle between two psychological forces, desire and willpower. Finally, two general classes of self-control strategies are described: those that directly reduce desire, and those that overcome desire through will power.

Effects of Stroop task duration on subsequent cognitive and physical performance

The strength model of self-control purports to explain why brief cognitive response inhibition tasks impair subsequent isometric handgrip endurance. A…

Intention, control, and the feeling of commitment

In this paper we propose that rational control of action, agentive stability over time, and coordinated social behavior, are assisted by a form of metacognitive monitoring, leading to an aspect of conscious experience: a feeling of commitment. This feeling of commitment is attached to the formation, retrieval, and execution of intentions. The metacognitive monitoring that produces it is sensitive to the importance of intentions. And the feeling of commitment facilitates the stability and effectiveness of intentions across individual and social contexts, strengthens goal shielding, biases intention retrieval, and thus structures prospective deliberation, expression of intention, and execution of intention. In section two, we discuss control, which is a central aspect of agency and action. In section three, we discuss a crucial part of control: intention. We also discuss a crucial part of intention: commitment. In section four we relate the commitment involved in intention with definitions of commitment in the literature. In section five we offer and elucidate our hypothesis.

Self-Control and the Theory of Consumption

To study the behavior of agents who are susceptible to temptation in infinite horizon consumption problems under uncertainty, we define and characterize dynamic self-control (DSC) preferences. DSC pr...

Anticipation and Choice Heuristics in the Dynamic Consumption of Pain Relief

Humans frequently need to allocate resources across multiple time-steps. Economic theory proposes that subjects do so according to a stable set of intertemporal preferences, but the computational demands of such decisions encourage the use of formally less competent heuristics. Few empirical studies have examined dynamic resource allocation decisions systematically. Here we conducted an experiment involving the dynamic consumption over approximately 15 minutes of a limited budget of relief from moderately painful stimuli. We had previously elicited the participants’ time preferences for the same painful stimuli in one-off choices, allowing us to assess self-consistency. Participants exhibited three characteristic behaviors: saving relief until the end, spreading relief across time, and early spending, of which the last was markedly less prominent. The likelihood that behavior was heuristic rather than normative is suggested by the weak correspondence between one-off and dynamic choices. We show that the consumption choices are consistent with a combination of simple heuristics involving early-spending, spreading or saving of relief until the end, with subjects predominantly exhibiting the last two.

The Benefits of Emergency Reserves: Greater Preference and Persistence for Goals that Have Slack with a Cost

Marketers of programs that are designed to help consumers reach goals face dual challenges of making the program attractive enough to encourage consumer signup while still motivating consumers to reach desirable goals and thus stay satisfied with the program. The authors offer a possible solution to this challenge: the emergency reserve, or slack with a cost. They demonstrate how an explicitly defined emergency reserve not only is preferred over other options for goal-related programs but can also lead to increased persistence. Study 1 demonstrates that consumers prefer programs with emergency reserves to programs that do not have them, and Study 2 further clarifies that consumers' preference for an emergency reserve depends on the presence of a superordinate goal. Study 3 reveals that consumers prefer goals with emergency reserves because they perceive them to have both higher attainability and value than other goals. Study 4 demonstrates that reserves can lead to increased goal persistence in a realistic task that involves persistence over time. Finally, Studies 5 and 6 reveal that consumers persist more with reserve goals because they want to avoid using the “emergency” reserve.

Too amused to stop? Self-control and the disengagement process on Netflix

Abstract. Consuming media entertainment often challenges recipients’ self-control. While past research related self-control almost exclusively to whether i

Save More Today or Tomorrow: The Role of Urgency in Precommitment Design

To encourage farsighted behaviors, previous research suggests that marketers should invite consumers to precommit to adopting these behaviors “later.” However, the authors propose that people will draw different inferences from different types of precommitment offers, and that these inferences can help explain when precommitment is (and is not) effective at increasing adoption of farsighted behaviors. Specifically, the authors theorize that simultaneously offering consumers the opportunity to adopt a farsighted behavior now or later (i.e., offering “simultaneous precommitment”) may signal that the behavior is not urgently recommended; however, offering consumers the opportunity to adopt that behavior immediately and then, only if they decline, inviting them to adopt it later (i.e., offering “sequential precommitment”) may signal just the opposite. In a multisite field experiment (N = 5,196), the authors find that simultaneously giving consumers the chance to increase their savings now or later reduced retirement savings. Two preregistered lab studies (N = 5,080) show that simultaneous precommitment leads people to infer that taking action is not urgently recommended, and such inferences predict less adoption of recommended behaviors. Importantly, offering sequential precommitment increases inferred urgency, predicting greater adoption. Together, this research advances knowledge about the limits and potential of precommitment.

Yielding to Temptation: Self‐Control Failure, Impulsive Purchasing, and Consumer Behavior

Abstract. Self-control is a promising concept for consumer research, and self-control failure may be an important cause of impulsive purchasing. Three caus

Mis-Nudging Morality

Morals constrain self-serving behavior. Yet, self-regulation failures in the face of monetary temptation are common at the workplace. To limit such failures, organizations can design environments that limit the temptation to behave self-servingly, nudging workers to uphold their morals. In a series of experiments where participants may be tempted to take excessive pay after exerting effort, we study whether a simple intervention—asking individuals to state the wage they believe should be paid ex ante, before facing the temptation to take excessive compensation—prevents self-serving behavior. In contrast to lay beliefs and the predictions from prior work, we find that such an intervention is not effective, leading to self-serving behavior. However, a more realistic elicitation procedure of the appropriate wage mitigates this effect. These findings contribute to work on the malleability of moral behavior showing that simple interventions thought to effectively mitigate self-serving behavior can prompt individuals to stretch their moral boundaries. They also stress the importance of properly testing interventions that might seem intuitive. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, behavioral economics and decision analysis. Funding: Financial support from the Israel Science Foundation [Grant 766/19] is gratefully acknowledged. Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.4344 .

Measuring Self-Control Problems

We develop a survey instrument to measure self-control problems in a sample of highly educated adults. This measure relates in the manner that theory predicts to liquid wealth accumulation and personality measures. Yet while self-control problems are typically seen as resulting in overconsumption and low wealth, we identify a significant group who underconsume and thereby accumulate high levels of wealth. In addition, self-control problems are smaller in scale for older than for younger respondents. Those who put money aside in retirement accounts may be delaying access to a point at which self-control problems are no longer important. (JEL D12, D14)

Leave Home without it? The Effects of Credit Card Debt and Available Credit on Spending

This research examines how credit card debt affects consumer spending. In five experimental and field studies, the authors demonstrate that outstanding credit card debt increases spending for consumers with high self-control. They also show that this effect can be eliminated by increasing the available credit on the credit card. Thus, when the available credit is low, consumers with greater self-control increase spending, but when the available credit is high, they reduce spending. The results extend the literature on goal violation and self-control and offer insights into consumer decision making and consumption patterns under conditions of debt.

Malleable Mental Accounting: The Effect of Flexibility on the Justification of Attractive Spending and Consumption Decisions

Mental accounts are often characterized as self‐control devices that consumers employ to prevent excess spending and consumption. However, under certain conditions of ambiguity, the mental accounting process is malleable; that is, consumers have flexibility in assigning expenses to different mental accounts. We demonstrate how consumers flexibly classify expenses, or construct accounts, to justify spending. An expense that can be assigned to more than one account (i.e., an ambiguous expense) is more likely to be incurred than an unambiguous expense that is constrained either by existing budgets or by previously constructed accounts. We explore the justification processes that underlie these results and their implications for mental accounts as self‐control devices.

Overcoming Salience Bias: How Real-Time Feedback Fosters Resource Conservation

Inattention and imperfect information bias behavior toward the salient and immediately visible. This distortion creates costs for individuals, the organizations in which they work, and society at large. We show that an effective way to overcome this bias is by making the implications of one’s behavior salient in real time, while individuals can directly adapt. In a large-scale field experiment, we gave participants real-time feedback on the resource consumption of a daily, energy-intensive activity (showering). We find that real-time feedback reduced resource consumption for the target behavior by 22%. At the household level, this led to much larger conservation gains in absolute terms than conventional policy interventions that provide aggregate feedback on resource use. High baseline users displayed a larger conservation effect, in line with the notion that real-time feedback helps eliminate “slack” in resource use. The approach is cost effective, is technically applicable to the vast majority of households, and generated savings of 1.2 kWh per day and household, which exceeds the average energy use for lighting. The intervention also shows how digitalization in our everyday lives makes information available that can help individuals overcome salience bias and act more in line with their preferences. This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.

A Generalizable Scale of Propensity to Plan: The Long and the Short of Planning for Time and for Money

Abstract. Planning has pronounced effects on consumer behavior and intertemporal choice. We develop a six-item scale measuring individual differences in pr