Commitment device

A rule someone puts on themselves now, in the calm, to bind the version of themselves that will meet the temptation later. It works by removing an option or by attaching a cost to it before the moment of choice arrives, which is why it is different from a resolution and different from being persuaded.

In this course it appears as the smallest available proof that a behaviour called cultural is movable. A promise made to a stranger with a clipboard, before an election, changed what people did during it. That is a very light intervention on a very heavy behaviour, and the honest reading is not that vote-selling is trivial. It is that it responds to design.

Source: Allen Hicken, Stephen Leider, Nico Ravanilla and Dean Yang (2018), “Temptation in vote-selling: Evidence from a field experiment in the Philippines,” Journal of Development Economics, 131, 1 to 14. In Sorsogon City, inviting voters to promise not to sell their vote was taken up by a majority of respondents, reduced vote-selling, and had a larger effect where the payments on offer were smaller; inviting voters to take the money and vote their conscience was significantly less effective. Free working paper: https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/102099/1/cesifo_wp4828.pdf .

First used in: 2.7 · Can a country change? Somebody already checked