My issue with commitment contracts is that I have no reason to believe they will do anything but make me miserable, and I don’t have enough money to risk. If I precommit to pay $5 if I fail at a certain task, I have no reason to believe that at the end of the given time period, I won’t be short 1% of my total wealth and worse off emotionally.
Value of information. Unless you have literally zero interest in finding out, there should be some sum of money, possibly less than $5, equal to the value of learning what you will actually do when you set up a contract for yourself.
Unless you have literally zero interest in finding out, there should be some sum of money, possibly less than $5, equal to the value of learning what you will actually do when you set up a contract for yourself.
That’s tricky. The experience of setting up a commitment contract for 0.0001% of your wealth is unlikely to provide any learning as to what you will actually do in response to a commitment contract of 5% (or 50%) of your wealth.
My issue with commitment contracts is that I have no reason to believe they will do anything but make me miserable, and I don’t have enough money to risk. If I precommit to pay $5 if I fail at a certain task, I have no reason to believe that at the end of the given time period, I won’t be short 1% of my total wealth and worse off emotionally.
I find it interesting that you think there is no reason to believe that a financial incentive would change your behavior.
Elsewhere he sounds like he tried some other kind of negative incentives and it didn’t work.
Value of information. Unless you have literally zero interest in finding out, there should be some sum of money, possibly less than $5, equal to the value of learning what you will actually do when you set up a contract for yourself.
That’s tricky. The experience of setting up a commitment contract for 0.0001% of your wealth is unlikely to provide any learning as to what you will actually do in response to a commitment contract of 5% (or 50%) of your wealth.