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Have yourself committed: having a hard time sticking to a goal? Daniel Akst reports on ways we can nudge ourselves in the right direction. And he finds there's a business opportunity, too.

Article Excerpt
As graduate students at MIT, Dean Karlan and John Romalis didn't just feast on food for thought, which is why, as they completed their studies in economics, they found themselves getting fat.

These pudgy scholars knew a little something about incentives, so they made a deal: each would have to lose 38 pounds in six months or forfeit half his annual income to the other. If both failed, the one who lost less would pay the other a quarter of his income. For a while nothing much happened, so they just extended the deadline--until they realized they were getting nowhere, and agreed to a clause making any further renegotiation attempts the basis of immediate forfeiture.

The new agreement worked. By 2002 both men had lost the weight, and as long as the stakes remained serious and nonnegotiable, they mostly kept it off. At one point, Karlan even collected $15,000 from his friend, whose weight had popped back up over the limit; Karlan says he had to take the money to maintain the credibility of their system.

Karlan has moved on to Yale and Romalis is at the University of Chicago, but both still struggle with their weight. Romalis reports that after ending his agreement with Karlan he has piled on the pounds. Karlan too gained weight in the absence of a possible financial loss, until he established a similar contract with his friend Ian Ayres, a Yale law professor. He's also made a contract to exercise regularly. His weight remains under control.

Why must these disciplined intellectuals subject themselves to a Damoclean legal agreement just to control their eating? As Karlan explains it, the contracts work by counteracting the natural human tendency to prize short-term rewards--the taste of pistachio Haagen-Dazs right now--over such longer-term goals as a healthy body weight and reasonable cholesterol level. We can all make rules for ourselves; Karlan's weight-loss contracts raise the cost of breaking them. Could he have lost the weight without a contract? Over a nice healthy salad in New Haven one sunny afternoon, he answers without hesitation: "No."

While this may sound like an arrangement only an economist could love, most of us have taken steps, at one time or another, to limit our future choices in order to guard against weakness or change of heart...