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Commitment devices seek to align short-term behavior with consciously desirable long-term goals. Often times the short-term costs associated with an action do not properly reflect its marginal effect on long-term costs. Employing commitment devices increases the short-term cost of perceived bad behavior to stay on track to achieve long-term goals. The most explicit way to do this is to draw up a contract where an individual promises to act positively in the short-term (in pursuit of a long-term goal) or else be forced to pay a predetermined amount to another party.

Notes from A Dual Self Model of Impulse Control by Drew Fudenberg and David K. Levine (McIntosh [1969])
 * People do not view time consistently. When given the choice between a greater quantity tomorrow and a lesser quantity today, many people will choose the lesser quantity. When given the same quantities, but in a year and a year and a day, almost everyone chooses the larger quantity.
 * There are not multiple selves which compete for dominance, but a single self with two subsystems - one preoccupied with maximizing short-run utility and the other with long run utility.
 * The short run self is indifferent to the decisions of the long run self.
 * “The idea of self-control is paradoxical unless it is assumed that the psyche contains more than one energy system, and that these energy systems have some degree of independence from each other.”

http://www.econ.yale.edu/~gtb3/Gharad_Bryan/Research_files/AnnualReviewFinal.pdf http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2011/01/the_odysseus_option.single.html We Have Met the Enemy: Self Control in the Age of Excess http://www.economist.com/node/10661442
 * "One behavioural-economics theory is that the (bad) short-term self does not give sufficient weight to the outcomes that the (good) long-term self values most."