Too much commitment? An online experiment with tempting YouTube content
通过在线实验，研究人们在面对诱人视频时是否过度购买承诺工具，发现部分人高估需求（过度悲观），但更多人低估需求，导致实际损失更大。
We explore the possibility that demand for costly commitment may prove unnecessary and thus excessive. In an online experiment, subjects face a tedious productivity task where tempting YouTube videos invite procrastination. Subjects can pay for a commitment device that removes the videos with probability less than one, allowing us to compare their willingness to pay with realized material and psychological costs of temptation. A significant share of subjects do overestimate their commitment demand, being overly pessimistic about their performance when tempted. Even more subjects underestimate demand, and total realized losses from revealed undercommitment is greater than from overcommitment. Thus, undercommitment dominates and is inconsistent with pure noise in stated demand.