Deadline Effect Research Articles

Time's ticking! Effects of deadline on the utilization of health services: Evidence from a cluster-randomized controlled trial

The low utilization of health services in rural areas is an essential factor affecting the health level of rural residents. Based on insights from behavioral economics, this study evaluates the average treatment effect of imposing a deadline on vision-care vouchers (i.e., the voucher-deadline intervention) on the utilization of health services. Using the vision health as a case study, a non-masked cluster-randomized controlled trial was conducted in 13 rural schools of a county in Shaanxi Province of China during 2018–2019. Among 1270 baseline sample students with myopia, 610 students from 6 schools were randomly assigned to receive vouchers with no deadline (i.e., the Control group), and 660 students from 7 schools to receive vouchers with a 30-day deadline (i.e., the Deadline group). The results showed that the voucher-deadline intervention significantly improved the vision-center visiting rate by 13.2 percentage points within 30 days and shortened the interval between visits (i.e., increased timeliness) by 18.7 days. In comparison, the vision-center visiting rate and the interval between visits among the control group were 16.7% and 30.5 days, respectively. However, considering a longer time frame (6 months), we found that intervention only shifted students' utilization to before the voucher expires without improving overall utilization rate. The loss aversion and time pressure induced by the voucher deadline are possible explanations for the treatment effects. This study suggests insights from behavioral economics can enhance the design of public health programs to improve the utilization and the cost-effectiveness of health-service programs. Trial registrationisrctn.org Identifier ISRCTN03252665.

Speeded response tasks with unpredictable deadlines

In response time (RT) research, it is common to instruct participants to respond as fast and as accurately as possible, which is easily conceived as a contradiction. Participants may overcome this dilemma using a two-fold strategy, with (A) delaying their response until they feel confident that enough information has been sampled, and (B) scheduling the response right before the end of the response window to avoid omissions. The purpose of this strategy is to satisfy the contradictory requirements of the task instructions, but both (A) and (B) may yield a distorted picture of the processing times under investigation. We asked participants to discriminate random dot motion with fixed and variable deadlines for responding. With the exponentially distributed variable deadline, strategic responding is useless because it is impossible to schedule an optimal time point for the response. We present two analyses, a model-free approach that investigates the effect of an unpredictable deadline on standard RT measures, and the fit of an RT model testing for effects of the deadline on specific parameters. Compared to the fixed deadline, faster responses that were less variable across participants were observed under the variable deadline, suggesting that the new paradigm can reduce strategic responding. We demonstrate how to deal with omitted responses and conclude that variable deadlines are a promising tool to exert time pressure in RT experiments and potentially yield better estimates of the underlying processing times.

Early arrival did not ensure the early acquisition of intravenous thrombosis for acute ischemic stroke during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Intravenous thrombolysis (IVT) in acute ischemic stroke (AIS) is a time-dependent treatment with a narrow therapeutic time window, in which the time delay could result from the deadline effect. One hospital-based cohort was recruited to detect the factors contributing to the deadline effect, where patients with the deadline effect were defined as those who were presented with the onset-to-door time (ODT) in the first 50%, while the door-to-needle time (DNT) was in the last quartile. DNT (in-hospital delay) was further subdivided into several time intervals [door-to-examination time (DET), door-to-imaging time (DIT), door-to-laboratory time (DLT), and decision-making time (DMT) of the patients or their proxies. A total of 186 IVT cases were enrolled, of which 17.2% (32/186) suffered a delay of the deadline effect. The median age was 66 years, and 35.5% were female. Baseline characteristics were similar between the two groups (all p>.05). For the comparisons of the time intervals, DIT (26 versus 15 min, p=.001) was significantly longer in the group with deadline effect, while the differences of DET, DLT, DMT, and ONT did not reach statistical significance (all p>.05). Upon multivariable adjustment in the binary logistic regression model, longer DIT [odds ratio (OR), 1.076; 95% confidence interval (CI), 1.036-1.118; p<.001], and history of coronary heart disease (OR, 3.898; 95%CI, 1.415-10.735; p=.008) were independently associated with deadline effect in the binary logistic regression model, while admitted in the working day (OR, 0.674; 95%CI, 0.096-0.907; p=.033), and having medical insurance (OR, 0.350; 95% CI, 0.132-0.931; p=.035) were negatively associated with the deadline effect. A speed-safety tradeoff phenomenon from the deadline effect was observed in 17.2% of IVT cases during the COVID-19 pandemic, where longer DIT contributed a lot to this time delay. Patients without medical insurance, or admitted in official holidays were more likely to experience a delay of the deadline effect.

Short-term incentives of research evaluations: Evidence from the UK Research Excellence Framework

We document incentive effects of the evaluation deadlines in the UK’s performance-based research funding system. Studying 3,597,272 publications by UK researchers, we find that publications just before assessment deadlines obtain substantially fewer citations and are published in venues with lower impact factors. These trends reverse abruptly after the deadlines. We discuss different factors that contribute to this observation and provide evidence that evaluation deadlines are likely to set incentives against investment in research quality and long-term topics. We conclude that where such shifts in research incentives are not intended, they might require balancing by additional incentives for exploratory, long-term oriented research.

Correcting for transitory effects in RCTs: Evidence from the RAND Health Insurance Experiment

AbstractTemporary randomized controlled trials are susceptible to transitory effects that would not result from a permanent treatment. We find a large and statistically significant “deadline effect”—a surge in spending in the final treatment year—in the RAND Health Insurance Experiment, identified by random allocation to three‐ or five‐year enrolment terms. Participants facing lower coinsurance rates show larger spending surges. Partialing out the price–deadline interaction reduces in magnitude estimates of the permanent price elasticity of drug spending (and in some specifications of outpatient and supplies spending). This implies higher optimal coinsurance rates and illustrates the importance of experimental design to identifying parameters of interest in randomized controlled trials.

Do Deadlines Affect Project Completion? Experimental Evidence from Israeli Vocational Colleges

We study a large-scale intervention aimed at increasing graduation rates in Israeli vocational colleges. In this context, the main reason for low graduation rates has been found to be the failure of students to complete the required final project. This may result from procrastination which is prevalent among students in many settings. To address procrastination, we introduce a deadline for final project defense in randomly selected departments while control group departments maintain the practice of scheduling defense dates on a rolling basis. We compare student performance over time in treated and control departments in a difference-in-differences framework and find no effect of deadlines on project defense or on graduation rates. A potential explanation for these findings is that there are other constraints faced by students, such as academic difficulties or a low perceived value of the diploma, which are not alleviated by the deadline. Using administrative and survey data, we find that deadlines have no effect even when the alternative constraints are not binding.

Jurisprudential investigation of the effect of deadline for delivery in forward sale with consideration of law on presale of apartment enacted in 2010

Bai Salam is a contract of sale in which the object of sale is Mu'ajjal, and it is recorded, but the price is paid in cash, immediately. The deadline is considered as a pillar for contract, and if not set, the contract is terminated. the object of sale is Mu'ajjal in apartment presale contract, but it is not a pillar for the contract. The current study has investigated the effects of a deadline for delivery of the object of sale and its relevant contract. The results indicate that the presale contract is a type of Bai, and the commonality between them is that both of them are forward sales.

Temporal Rumor Blocking in Online Social Networks: A Sampling-Based Approach

Online social networks (OSNs) are one of the most popular services available on the Internet. They are also considered as the primary source of news for many people. In spite of all the advantages of OSNs, dissemination of rumors has become a major concern. Influence blocking maximization (IBM) is the problem of determining savior users to limit the spread of misinformation as much as possible. Although the IBM problem has been widely studied, most of existing works neglect the effect of deadline and delay. In this article, we study Temporal IBM and propose a sampling-based approach (TIBM-M) with both theoretical guarantee and practical runtime efficiency. We perform extensive experiments on four real-world datasets and both experimentally and theoretically show that TIBM-M consistently matches the greedy algorithm in terms of effectiveness while significantly improves the efficiency. The results also indicate that TIBM-M has better blocking effect than other methods in all conditions.

Deadlines and Memory Limitations

This paper presents the results of two natural field experiments at a dental clinic. Guided by a simple theoretical model, we exogenously vary deadlines and associated rewards for arranging checkup appointments. Our data show strong and systematic effects of deadlines on patients’ behavior. Imposing deadlines induces patients to act earlier and at a persistently higher frequency than without a deadline. We further document that individuals systematically respond to deadlines even if these are not tied to explicit rewards. Several of our findings suggest that individuals’ responses to deadlines are shaped by limitations in memory and attention. Our results illustrate that deadlines can be a powerful management tool to encourage timely task completion and to increase the cost effectiveness of performance-contingent rewards. This paper was accepted by Axel Ockenfels, behavioral economics and decision analysis.

Procrastination and the non‐monotonic effect of deadlines on task completion

AbstractWe conduct a field experiment to test the non‐monotonic effect of deadline length on task completion. Participants are invited to complete an online survey in which a donation goes to charity. They are given either 1 week, 1 month, or no deadline to respond. Responses are lowest for the 1‐month deadline and highest when no deadline is specified. No deadline and the 1‐week deadline feature a large number of early responses, while providing a 1‐month deadline appears to give people permission to procrastinate. If they are inattentive, they might forget to complete the task.

SEQUENTIAL SEARCH WITH ADAPTIVE INTENSITY

AbstractThis article studies sequential search problems, where a searcher chooses search intensity adaptively in each period. We fully characterize the optimal search rule and value, decomposing the intertemporal change of search intensity into the fall‐back value effect and the deadline effect. We show that the optimal search intensity (value) is submodular (supermodular) in fall‐back value and time. It follows that the fall‐back value effect increases when the deadline approaches, and the deadline effect decreases when a searcher's fall‐back value gets higher. We further investigate the connection between search with full and no recall to quantify the value of recall.

On the Rate and Age of Information for non-preemptive systems with prioritized arrivals and deterministic packet deadlines in IoT networks

In this paper, we consider two different classes of IoT sensors with high and low priorities in which both classes send their data to a Monitoring Center (MC) equipped with one server and a buffer to store the arrival packets waiting in the queue, representing an M/M/1/2 system. An error-free channel predominates the link between the sensors and MC. We assume a non-preemptive scheme applying priorities on the buffer in MC so that the packets with lower priority in the queue can be replaced by more urgent higher priority packets but not in the service, as well. The arrival packets are specified by deadline characteristic due to the great demand for fresh data. The deadline is provided to free the buffer and let the monitoring center be updated by the latest data. As significant parameters in calculating the throughput and freshness of data, Rate of Information (RoI) and system’s Age of Information (AoI) are investigated in the MC. Our goal is to study the effect of priority and packet deadlines on the rate and status update of the system. Thus, a Markov model is applied to derive the closed form expressions considering deterministic deadlines and the impact of high and low priority packets. Also, a new metric named the Age to Rate Ratio of Information (ARRoI) is introduced and discussed for better realization of the relation between effective arrival rate and AoI. Simulation results for various parameters confirm the analytical results and show that the newly introduced metric, ARRoI, could be employed in finding proper transmission rates.

Deadlines Can Improve Surgical Care

Whether perfectionist or procrastinator, it is natural to dread a deadline. No matter what profession (ie, journalist, teacher, lawyer, congressman, or surgeon), the panic of a looming deadline is what nightmares are made of. Christopher Cox's recent publication “The Deadline Effect” explores the power of deadlines.1 His book describes how deadlines have the potential to either paralyze or motivate and empower the individual to solve problems (big or small) for which the theoretical line in the sand has been drawn.

The effect of deadlines on cancer screening completion: a randomized controlled trial

Cancer is the second leading cause of death in the United States. Although screening facilitates prevention and early detection and is one of the most effective approaches to reducing cancer mortality, participation is low—particularly among underserved populations. In a large, preregistered field experiment (n = 7711), we tested whether deadlines—both with and without monetary incentives tied to them—increase colorectal cancer (CRC) screening. We found that all screening invitations with an imposed deadline increased completion, ranging from 2.5% to 7.3% relative to control (ps < .004). Most importantly, individuals who received a short deadline with no incentive were as likely to complete screening (9.7%) as those whose invitation included a deadline coupled with either a small (9.1%) or large declining financial incentive (12.0%; ps = .57 and .04, respectively). These results suggest that merely imposing deadlines—especially short ones—can significantly increase CRC screening completion, and may also have implications for other forms of cancer screening.

Numerical study on the deadline-concerning priority queuing model

The Barab\'asi's priority queuing model [A.-L. Barab\'asi, Nature \textbf{435}, 207 (2005)] and its variants have been extensively studied to understand heavy-tailed distributions of the inter-event times and the response times observed in various empirical analyses of human dynamics. In this paper, we focus on the effects of deadlines assigned to the tasks in a queue of fixed size on the response-time distributions. Here, the response time is defined as the time interval between the arrival and the execution of the task. We propose a deadline-concerning priority queuing model, in which as the deadline approaches, the priority is adjusted using the inverse of the remaining time to the deadline. By performing the numerical simulations, we find that the power-law exponent characterizing the response-time distributions is less than $1$ under the deterministic selection protocol while it has the value of $1$ under the nondeterministic selection protocol.

Racing against the clock: Evidence-based versus time-based decisions.

Classical dynamic theories of decision making assume that responses are triggered by accumulating a threshold amount of information. Recently, there has been a growing appreciation that the passage of time also plays a role in triggering responses. We propose that decision processes are composed of 2 diffusive accumulation mechanisms-1 evidence-based and 1 time-based-that compete in an independent race architecture. We show that this timed racing diffusion model (TRDM) provides a unified, comprehensive, and quantitatively accurate explanation of key decision phenomena-including the effects of implicit and explicit deadlines and the relative speed of correct and error responses under speed-accuracy trade-offs-without requiring additional mechanisms that have been criticized as being ad hoc in theoretical motivation and difficult to estimate, such as trial-to-trial variability parameters, collapsing thresholds, or urgency signals. In contrast, our addition is grounded in a widely validated account of time-estimation performance, enabling the same mechanism to simultaneously account for interval estimation and decision making with an explicit deadline. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Never Too Late? The Role of Visiting Delay in Crowdsourcing Contests

This paper studies the role of visiting delay in crowdsourcing contests – the time elapsed between the start of a contest and a solver’s first visit to the contest. Because crowdsourcing platforms often host multiple contests parallelly, solvers may not be aware of contests when they open for participation. This creates heterogeneity among solvers in terms of their visiting delay and awareness of contest details. We theorize that visiting delay may impact solvers’ submission behavior and performance through two countervailing forces: a deadline effect – an increased intention to participate induced by a tighter deadline, and a time-disadvantage effect – a decreased intention to participate due to the limited time available in the contest. Using a novel dataset from an established crowdsourcing platform, we show the heterogeneous effects of visiting delay on the submission behavior, namely, the time to first submission and the number of submissions, through various empirical analyses. We demonstrate that when solvers have higher levels of visiting delay, the deadline effect dominates the time-disadvantage effect, resulting in a faster submission time initially. However, after the first submission, the time-disadvantage effect dominates the deadline effect, resulting in fewer and slower submissions. Additionally, the deadline (time-disadvantage) effect is amplified (attenuated) by the average contest prize amount in a non-linear manner. Finally, we show that these dynamics affect the solvers’ likelihood of developing an acceptable submission and a winning submission. Our results provide implications for seekers and platform designers in scheduling contests and in designing incentives for managing the effects of visiting delay.

Pretrial negotiations under optimism

AbstractWe develop a tractable and versatile model of pretrial negotiation in which the negotiating parties are optimistic about the judge's decision and anticipate the possible arrival of public information about the case prior to the trial date. The parties will settle immediately upon the arrival of information. However, they may also agree to settle prior to an arrival. We derive the settlement dynamics prior to an arrival: negotiations result in either immediate agreement, a weak deadline effect—settling at a particular date before the deadline, a strong deadline effect—settling at the deadline, or impasse, depending on the level of optimism. Our findings match stylized facts.

Effect of childbearing deadline on women&amp;rsquo;s wanted fertility

Effect of childbearing deadline on women&amp;rsquo;s wanted fertility

The price of outsourcing: A content analysis of the effects of early deadlines on the sports section in The Oklahoman

Newspapers have begun outsourcing their printing to cut costs, and this study employs a content analysis to examine its effects on the award-winning sports section of The Oklahoman. Before outsourcing, it was a typical metropolitan daily covering all important games with few missing late scores. Afterward, problems associated with earlier deadlines and printing in another city included late delivery, incomplete or missing game coverage, and numerous missing scores. These problems led to complaints that the publisher acknowledged. The results indicate outsourcing has costs that management should consider before employing it. Although the newspaper followed economic principles, these problems could damage its reputation.