Replication of "Procrastination, Deadlines, And Performance: Self-Control by Precommitment"

We present the results of a replication of Study 2 from Ariely and Wertembroch (2002), as well as a comparison of the replication data and the original data, which was kindly given to us in 2006 by one of the original authors. We show that the results of the paper do not replicate. In particular, in the replication, changes in the deadlines have a negligible effect on the three performance metrics and several survey metrics that were used in the original study. In particular, evenly spaced deadlines exogenously imposed on subjects do not stand apart for their effectiveness in reducing procrastination in subjects. Beyond failing to replicate the original finding, we also document that several patterns that arguably should be present in both datasets are not found in the original data, suggesting a further lack of robustness.