Procrastination, self-imposed deadlines and other commitment devices

In this paper we model a decision maker who must exert costly effort to complete single task by fixed deadline. Effort costs evolve stochastically in continuous time. The optimally waits until are less than given threshold, the solution an optimal stopping time problem. We derive for three cases: (1) exponential makers, (2) Naïve hyperbolic discounters and (3) sophisticated discounters. Absent deadlines, show that makers behave as if they were consistent but instead have smaller reward completing task, while naïfs never task. presence of may, counterintuitively, threshold which is decreasing approach An extensive numerical study shows that, unlike or always prefer longer will often self-impose binding deadline form commitment, naïve not, how varies with changes underlying cost, preference self-control parameters.