Back to History

Fields Changed

Registration

Field Before After
Trial Status in_development completed
Trial End Date December 20, 2023 January 30, 2024
Last Published November 17, 2023 08:00 AM October 04, 2024 09:37 PM
Intervention End Date December 20, 2023 January 30, 2024
Primary Outcomes (End Points) The difference between ideal and actual completion of Exercise 1. The difference between ideal and actual completion of Challenge 1.
Experimental Design (Public) We ask students to complete assignments with two deadlines. Students who finish their assignments before the first deadline earn extra points. Our assignment scheme resembles real-effort Convex Time Budget (CTB) choices. Students are randomized into three treatments: ex-ante perfect memory, ex-post perfect memory, and imperfect memory. Students in the ex-ante perfect memory treatment are aware before completing the assignment that they will be reminded of their completion status, whereas students in the ex-post perfect memory treatment are not aware but receive reminders nonetheless. Students in the imperfect memory treatment do not receive reminders about their assignment completion status. Our first hypothesis is that students in the ex-ante perfect memory treatment will, on average, complete the assignment earlier than those in the other two treatments because when failures cannot be forgotten, students must persevere to maintain an optimistic belief about their present biases. Our second hypothesis is that students in the ex-post perfect memory treatment will have a lower belief in their present bias than those in the imperfect memory treatment because they are reminded of their failure. We study why people are overly optimistic about their self-control (present bias). Our hypothesis is that an optimistic view on present bias can motivate people to undertake challenging tasks. We plan to test this hypothesis in a classroom setting. We aim to observe the following: - Students who are confident in their self-control ability are more likely to start a challenging assignment. - If students remember a previous failure in completing an assignment, they are less likely to start a challenging assignment. - To avoid remembering a failure, students persevere more in order to maintain an optimistic belief in their self-control ability. We plan to conduct this experiment in an introductory economics course. Students in this course are freshmen and sophomores in the business major at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Planned Number of Observations 340 269 students
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms Our random assignment is at the individual level. We have 134 students in the "ex-ante perfect memory" treatment, 134 students in the "imperfect memory" treatment, and 72 students in the "ex-post perfect memory" treatment. Our random assignment is at the individual level. We have 90 students in the "ex-ante perfect memory" treatment, 90 students in the "imperfect memory" treatment, and 89 students in the "ex-post perfect memory" treatment.
Secondary Outcomes (End Points) The difference between ideal and predicted completion of Exercise 2. The sign-up rate for Challenge 2.
Public locations Yes No
Back to top

Irbs

Field Before After
IRB Name Survey and Behavioural Research Ethics Committee at The Chinese University of Hong Kong
IRB Approval Date August 22, 2024
IRB Approval Number SBRE‐24‐0037
Back to top