AEA RCT Registry

You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.

Fields Changed

Registration

Field	Before	After
Abstract	Procrastination is a common issue among students. My research explores procrastination as a self-defensive mechanism by integrating psychological insights with economic theory in a field experiment with college students. I test whether a low-cost intervention on self-esteem can reduce procrastination, and its impact on academic performance. Specifically, my project is a field experiment with first year students at a public university in Switzerland. Procrastination will be measured using a learning platform, where professors upload questions for student engagement and assessment. Students will be randomly assigned to three groups, each receiving different interventions. The first group will set deadlines. The second group will receive a self-esteem booster with positive messages emphasizing progress in the platform. The third group serves as a control and will use the standard version of the platform. I will evaluate the impact of the interventions on procrastination. Additionally, I will use machine learning techniques to estimate treatment effect heterogeneity. Finally, I will estimate the effect of the interventions on academic performance. I run a pilot study in Fall 2024 and plan to implement the main experiment in Fall 2025.	Procrastination is a common issue among students. My research explores procrastination as a self-defensive mechanism by integrating psychological insights with economic theory in a field experiment with college students. I test whether a low-cost intervention on self-esteem can reduce procrastination, and its impact on academic performance. Specifically, my project is a field experiment with first year students at a public university in Switzerland. Procrastination will be measured using a learning platform, where professors upload questions for student engagement and assessment. Students will be randomly assigned to three groups, each receiving different interventions. The first group will set deadlines. The second group will receive a self-esteem booster with positive messages emphasizing progress in the platform. The third group serves as a control and will use the standard version of the platform. I will evaluate the impact of the interventions on procrastination. Additionally, I will use machine learning techniques to estimate treatment effect heterogeneity. Finally, I will estimate the effect of the interventions on academic performance, subject to data availability from the university. I run a first study in Fall 2024 and a second study in Fall 2025. In the second study, the deadlines group is replaced by an information treatment on study effort.
Last Published	January 20, 2025 09:26 AM	November 09, 2025 02:49 PM
Intervention End Date	February 15, 2026	July 31, 2026
Primary Outcomes (End Points)	The outcomes will include: (1) data collected from a learning platform on study effort; (2) administrative outcomes on students' performance, grades, points in the exams.	The outcomes will include: (1) data collected from a learning platform on study effort; (2) administrative outcomes on students' performance (subject to availability from the university)
Experimental Design (Public)	Students will be randomly assigned to one of three treatment arms. Specifically, one-third of the participants will receive the self-esteem boost, one-third will be given the option to set deadlines, and one-third will use the standard version of the learning platform.	Students will be randomly assigned to one of three treatment arms. Specifically, in the first study one-third of the participants will receive the self-esteem boost, one-third will be given the option to set deadlines, and one-third will use the standard version of the learning platform. In the second study, the deadline group is replaced by an information treatment group.
Planned Number of Clusters	1500 students	Study 1: 1500 students Study 2: 1500 students
Planned Number of Observations	1500 students	Study 1: 1500 students Study 2: 1500 students
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms	500 students self-esteem booster 500 students deadlines 500 students control	500 students per treatment arm
Additional Keyword(s)	self-esteem, procrastination, deadlines, learning app, college students	self-esteem, procrastination, learning app, college students
Secondary Outcomes (End Points)	Self-esteem, self-confidence, time management	Self-esteem, procrastination, time management
Secondary Outcomes (Explanation)	Self-esteem measured by Rosenberg's Self Esteem Scale (Rosenberg 1965) Self-confidence measured by questions on the expected academic performance and relative performance compared to peers Time management measured by a short version of the Time Management Behaviors Scale (Peeters and Rutte 2005)	Self-esteem measured by Rosenberg's Self Esteem Scale (Rosenberg 1965) Procrastination measured using the GPS-9 (Sirois, Yang, and Eerde 2019) Time management measured by a short version of the Time Management Behaviors Scale (Peeters and Rutte 2005)