Three years ago, I wrote about my experience with Stickk.com, a website designed by economists to help you keep your New Year's resolutions — or any other resolutions you may have. The site takes a deposit from you and you sign a 'commitment contract': if you keep your resolution, your money is safe and will eventually be returned. If you slip, Stickk starts donating chunks of your cash to charity. I was Stickk's first customer and the site worked for me: I started doing regular press-ups and sit-ups, and I'm still doing them.
The basic idea behind Stickk seems sensible but, the harder you think about it, the more mysterious it becomes. The site recognises a kind of split personality: Dr Jekyll would like to give up smoking; Mr Hyde begs to differ. Without this divided self, there would be no point in Stickk: you'd either decide you wanted to quit smoking, or you wouldn't. But the question then arises: whose side should we be on? Quitting smoking seems unproblematic, but what if Dr Jekyll wants to force Mr Hyde into a dangerous crash diet?
A second puzzle is why the honour system works so well. Professor Ian Ayres, one of the creators of Stickk, finds that it is often unnecessary to check that people are keeping to their resolutions. People tend either to stick to their goals or to own up and pay up: they rarely take the easy way out and lie. There are limits to this, however, and Ayres has ingenious techniques for checking up — his own bathroom scales are internet-enabled and they post his weight on Twitter every time he steps on.
Perhaps Ayres is wise to automate the process. One of the problems with turning a resolution into a bet is that the person you bet with is often reluctant to follow through. Ayres once teamed up with the US television show ABC Primetime, to encourage dieters to lose weight. The commitment: if they didn't, photos of the pre-dieters in their swimsuits would be shown on national television. In some ways the experiment was a success: the dieters did lose weight and most of them hit their targets. But the trouble was, ABC's producers couldn't be persuaded to follow through and show the swimsuit photos of the dieters who had failed. In the end, Ayres gave up: the commitment contract was crumbling because the ABC producers didn't want to look cruel.
Then again, perhaps it doesn't do to be too relentless. Ayres once agreed a commitment contract with one of his students at Yale: she could submit her thesis late, but had to give $100 to charity every month until it was due. Ten years later, Ayres discovered that the poor ex-student was still sticking to the deal — the thesis wasn't done and she'd donated $12,000 to charity. Before you bet too much on your New Year willpower, this is a cautionary tale to bear in mind.
Tim Harford's new book, Dear Undercover Economist, is now out in paperback
BUY IT HERE Dear Undercover Economist: The Very Best Letters from the "Dear Economist" Column
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