Within Precommitment
Can You Precommit Too Much or Too Little?
People can restrict themselves too much or too little, so effective precommitment depends on estimating temptation without sacrificing useful flexibility.
On this page
- Why people misjudge the future cost of temptation
- What undercommitment and overcommitment look like
- How to choose the smallest reliable restriction
Page outline Jump by section
Introduction
Precommitment can fail in two opposite ways. Undercommitment leaves enough room for a predictable temptation to win; overcommitment removes more freedom than the problem actually requires, making legitimate changes of plan unnecessarily costly. The practical target is therefore not maximum restriction. It is the smallest restriction that reliably changes what happens at the vulnerable moment.
This is difficult because choosing a commitment requires a forecast about your future self. You must estimate how strong the temptation will be, whether the restriction will actually stop the lapse, and how valuable flexibility might become if circumstances change. Research shows that people make errors in both directions. In an experiment built around distracting YouTube videos, participants sometimes paid for commitment they did not need, but undercommitment was more common and produced larger aggregate losses.[ScienceDirect]sciencedirect.comToo much commitment? An online experiment with tempting YouTube content - ScienceDirect… The lesson is not simply to “be stricter”. It is to calibrate the constraint to the failure you can actually predict.
Why we misjudge the future cost of temptation
A commitment decision contains an awkward forecasting problem. From a calm vantage point, you have to estimate what will happen later when an immediately attractive alternative is present. People who underestimate that future pull can choose a restriction too weak to work. People who overestimate it can buy protection against a failure that would never have occurred.
Claes Ek and Margaret Samahita tested this unusually directly. Participants completed a tedious online task while entertaining YouTube videos offered an opportunity to procrastinate. They could pay for a commitment device that probabilistically removed the videos. Because the researchers could compare willingness to pay for protection with participants’ realised losses when exposed to temptation, they could identify errors on both sides. A substantial group appeared to overcommit, being too pessimistic about how they would perform with temptation available. Yet more participants undercommitted, and the total losses associated with undercommitment were larger.[ScienceDirect]sciencedirect.comToo much commitment? An online experiment with tempting YouTube content - ScienceDirect…
That result matters because ordinary advice often assumes only one forecasting error: future me will be weaker than present me expects. That is important, but incomplete. Some people apparently make the opposite mistake and treat anticipated temptation as more dangerous than it turns out to be. Effective self-improvement therefore requires calibration rather than a blanket preference for harder constraints.
A related issue is awareness of one’s own self-control problem. Research distinguishing people who recognise their future self-control difficulties from those who do not finds that this awareness predicts commitment behaviour. People who are relatively sophisticated about their limitations are more likely to use commitment devices than people who fail to anticipate their own inconsistency.[IZA]iza.orgSophistication about Self-Control | IZA@LISER NetworkSophistication about Self-Control | IZA@LISER Network… But recognising that a problem exists is not the same as knowing exactly how much commitment it requires.
Classic research on self-imposed deadlines illustrates the distinction. Dan Ariely and Klaus Wertenbroch found that people were willing to impose costly deadlines on themselves and that those deadlines improved performance, suggesting genuine awareness of procrastination. Yet participants did not choose deadlines optimally: externally imposed, evenly spaced deadlines produced better performance in the relevant experiment. People could recognise the need for a constraint without accurately designing it.[Sage Journals]journals.sagepub.comSage JournalsProcrastination, Deadlines, and Performance: Self-Control by Precommitment - Dan Ariely, Klaus Wertenbroch, 2002…
What too little and too much commitment look like
Undercommitment is easy to mistake for commitment because some obstacle has technically been created. The relevant question, however, is whether that obstacle is large enough to change behaviour when temptation arrives.
A revealing field example comes from Anett John’s research on commitment savings in the Philippines. Participants could choose a savings plan and their own penalty for falling behind. The product increased savings on average, but 55% of clients defaulted and incurred monetary losses. The evidence was consistent with many participants choosing penalties too small to overcome their self-control problem: 80% selected the minimum permitted termination fee.[informs.org]pubsonline.informs.orgWhen Commitment Fails: Evidence from a Field Experiment | Management ScienceJune 12, 2019…
This is an important form of undercommitment disguised as prudence. A small penalty feels safer when chosen in advance, but if it is too small to affect the later decision, the person receives the disadvantages of commitment without its central benefit. In John’s study, many people were not merely failing to save; they were failing under a contract that could also impose a loss. The weakest commitment was not necessarily the safest commitment.
Everyday versions are less dramatic but structurally similar:
- A website blocker that can be dismissed instantly may add a click without stopping a predictable two-hour distraction.
- Putting spending money in a separate account may accomplish little if transferring it back takes seconds.
- Setting a self-imposed deadline with no consequence for moving it may simply create another date to renegotiate.
- Keeping a tempting option “just in case” can preserve exactly the choice that repeatedly defeats the original plan.
Overcommitment has the opposite structure. The restriction works against temptation, but it also blocks choices that the person would reasonably want to make. A rigid evening internet shutdown may prevent distraction, for example, while also preventing an unexpected piece of urgent work. Locking too much cash away may control discretionary spending but create difficulties when an unforeseen expense appears.
The general economic problem is that flexibility has value under uncertainty. David Laibson’s analysis of the relatively limited real-world demand for commitment emphasises that commitment itself has costs: variation in future opportunity costs, direct costs of restricting oneself and imperfect awareness of future behaviour can make a rigid constraint unattractive even for someone with present-biased preferences. In his calibrated model, the perceived benefits of commitment are often outweighed by its costs.[American Economic Association]aeaweb.orgAmerican Economic Association Why Don't Present-Biased Agents Make Commitments?American Economic AssociationWhy Don't Present-Biased Agents Make Commitments? - American Economic Association…
So declining a hard commitment is not necessarily evidence of weak motivation. Sometimes keeping an escape route is rational because the future contains genuine information that the present cannot know.
The real trade-off is temptation versus useful flexibility
This produces a more useful way to think about commitment strength. Imagine a spectrum running from unrestricted choice to complete lock-in. Moving towards lock-in provides more protection against predictable lapses, but it can also increase the cost of responding to legitimate surprises.
The best position depends on the predictability of the reason you will want to change course. If the future urge to abandon the plan is highly predictable and repeatedly turns out to be something you later regret, flexibility has relatively little value at that point. If future circumstances genuinely vary in ways that matter, flexibility becomes more valuable.
Consider two superficially similar plans to stop using distracting websites between 7 pm and 9 pm. One person has months of evidence that they repeatedly open entertainment sites during that window, lose an hour and regret it afterwards. Another sometimes needs the same sites for work, communication or research. A hard two-hour block addresses a highly predictable lapse for the first person. For the second, the identical restriction may solve one problem by creating another.
This is why “harder” cannot be treated as synonymous with “better”. Reviews of commitment-device research distinguish hard restrictions from softer commitments precisely because commitment can take different forms and impose different costs.[Annual Reviews]annualreviews.orgAnnual Reviews Commitment Devices | Annual ReviewsAnnual Reviews Commitment Devices | Annual Reviews Experimental work on savings also shows that people can deliberately value substantial illiquidity as protection against spending, even though illiquidity exposes them to the risk that money will be unavailable when circumstances change.[National Bureau of Economic Research]nber.orgOpen source on nber.org.
More recent experimental work provides another useful clue: allowing precommitment to be revocable can increase people’s willingness to choose it. That does not mean revocable commitment is always preferable—the ease of reversal can recreate the original temptation problem—but it shows why intermediate designs can matter when people value both protection and flexibility.[OUP Academic]academic.oup.comOpen source on oup.com.
How to choose the smallest reliable restriction
The most useful calibration rule is to begin with the specific failure mechanism, not with the most severe commitment available. Ask what your past behaviour suggests must become difficult, slow or unavailable for the predictable lapse not to happen.
A practical sequence is:
- Identify the repeatable failure point. “I procrastinate” is too broad. “When I sit down to work after dinner, I open short-form video within ten minutes” identifies a decision that can actually be constrained.
- Estimate temptation from behaviour, not intention. Look at comparable past situations. If you have repeatedly overridden reminders but rarely circumvented a blocker, that history is better evidence about required commitment strength than how disciplined you currently feel.
- Use the least restrictive device that has previously been sufficient. If moving the phone to another room reliably solves the problem, there is little reason to lock it away for an entire evening. If a one-click override repeatedly fails, however, continuing to use it is undercommitment rather than flexibility.
- Preserve flexibility for identifiable legitimate reasons. An escape route should correspond to a real contingency, not merely the future desire to abandon the plan. A scheduled review, limited exception or deliberately inconvenient override can preserve some adaptability without restoring effortless access to the temptation.
- Update from actual failures. Repeated circumvention is evidence that the commitment is too weak. Repeated occasions when the restriction prevents sensible behaviour are evidence that it is too broad or rigid.
This approach treats commitment strength as something to be learned, rather than as a test of character. That is consistent with evidence that experience can change people’s demand for commitment. In a field experiment involving food choices, both information about commitment and direct experience with a device restricting participants to healthy foods roughly doubled subsequent demand for commitment, suggesting that people can initially underestimate its usefulness and revise their beliefs after learning what it does for them.[ScienceDirect]sciencedirect.comOpen source on sciencedirect.com.
The same learning principle should operate in the other direction. If repeated experience shows that a restriction creates costs while the feared lapse rarely occurs, weakening it is not failure. It is evidence-based recalibration.
Right-sized commitment
The central mistake is to judge a precommitment by how strict it sounds. A restriction deserves to exist only because it improves the decisions that actually occur later.
Too little commitment leaves the crucial temptation effectively intact. Too much treats every future change of mind as a self-control failure, even when circumstances have genuinely changed. Research finds evidence for both errors, although direct experimental evidence suggests that undercommitment can be the more common and costly problem.[ScienceDirect]sciencedirect.comToo much commitment? An online experiment with tempting YouTube content - ScienceDirect… Field evidence adds a further warning: a commitment can be simultaneously costly and too weak, as when a penalty is large enough to hurt after failure but not large enough to prevent the failure itself.[PubsOnline]pubsonline.informs.orgWhen Commitment Fails: Evidence from a Field Experiment | Management ScienceJune 12, 2019…
The useful question, then, is not “How can I make this impossible to break?” It is: What is the smallest advance restriction that reliably blocks the lapse I can predict, while leaving room for changes of plan that I have good reason to make?
That is the difference between merely limiting your future choices and designing a precommitment that is actually worth keeping.
Amazon book picks
Further Reading
Books and field guides related to Can You Precommit Too Much or Too Little?. Use these as the next step if you want deeper reading beyond the article.
Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness
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