A Commitment Mechanism is a tool or technique that lets people pre-commit to something. For example, an assurance contract is a pre-commitment done between several people which is conditional on other people also pre-committing.

Many commitment mechanisms incentivize following through on a commitment by penalizing failures to do so. For example, having to pay some amount of money, or automatically posting an announcement to your social media that you failed.

Posts marked with this tag present ideas for novel commitment mechanisms, assessments of the proposed or observed effectiveness of commitment mechanisms, and case studies of commitment mechanisms being applied in practice.

Related Concepts:

Pre-Commitment
Incentives

External Links:

www.beeminder.com
www.stickk.com

Commitment Mechanisms