Present-Bias, Procrastination and Deadlines in a Field Experiment

In this paper we model a decision maker who must exert costly eort to complete a single task by a xed deadline. Eort costs evolve stochastically in continuous time. The decision maker will then optimally wait to exert eort until costs are less than a given threshold, the solution to an optimal stopping time problem. We derive the solution to this model for three cases: (1) time consistent decision makers, (2) naıve hyperbolic discounters and (3) sophisticated hyperbolic discounters. Sophisticated hyperbolic discounters behave as if they were time consistent but instead have a smaller reward for completing the task. We show that sophisticated decision makers will often self-impose a deadline to ensure early completion of the task. Other forms of commitment are also discussed.