How do People Procrastinate to Meet a Deadline?
Abstract:
Relying on e-learning data, I report here on an empirical investigation of daily home-work progress to assess procrastination among high school students, whose behavior is susceptible to present-bias. The homework entails a non-binding goal for the students. The main findings were as follows. First, the goal encouraged a considerable number of students to study more to achieve it. Second, high achievers procrastinated until close to the deadline, particularly females for Math homework. Finally, a considerable subset of high achievers worked hard at the last minute to meet a non-binding deadline. These findings imply that a non-binding goal strongly motivates such students’ self-control in goal achievement; however, the process in one of procrastination, and the deadline prevents further procrastination despite being non-binding.
Report No.: | HIAS-E-33 |
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Author(s): | Yutaka Kayaba(a) |
Affiliation: | (a) Hitotsubashi Institute for Advanced Study, Hitotsubashi University |
Issued Date: | September 2016 |
Keywords: | Procrastination, non-binding goal, deadline |
JEL: | D03, D91, I21 |
Links: | PDF, HERMES-IR, RePEc |