Shape 11 · also called burning the boats
Commitment
Removing your own option raises your payoff, because it changes what the other side's best response is.
Real commitment devices are dull and everywhere: a published price list, a policy with no exception process, an automatic transfer on payday, a constitution, a penalty clause. Each is a decision made once, in the calm, so it need not be made again under pressure. They are rare for an obvious reason — everybody wants the credibility and nobody wants to give up the exit. The critical condition is that the commitment be observable and irreversible BEFORE the other side moves; announced during the negotiation it is just something you said.
- How it feels
- Somebody has deliberately made their own position harder to reverse.
- A rule is being cited that its own author cannot waive.
- The words are 'I am not able to', not 'I am not willing to'.
- The constraint was announced before anybody knew what the number would be.
- Who is playing
- The committer, the party whose best response is meant to change, and whoever ENFORCES the commitment. A commitment nobody can hold you to is not one, so the enforcer is the load-bearing player and is often not identified at all.
- Where it lands
- If the commitment is genuine, public and prior, the other side's best reply changes and the committer gets the favourable outcome. If it is any of announced-late, reversible, or private, nothing changes at all.
- What moves it
Build the constraint in advance and in public: publish the policy, sign the contract, automate the transfer, delegate the decision to somebody who cannot be leaned on. And be honest about the cost — commitment removes your flexibility in exactly the cases where flexibility would have paid.
Not to be confused with
Nearly every misread in practice is a shape mistaken for its neighbour — and each of those mistakes points you at the wrong fix.
Chicken
Is commitment the fix, or the shape? Chicken is the situation; commitment is the move that wins it. If both sides commit, chicken ends in the crash.
Costly Signalling
Are you removing an option, or paying a cost to prove a fact? Commitment changes what you CAN do; signalling reveals what you ARE.
Where you have already met it
Law and Courts
A published no-negotiation policy on extortion. It only deters if it existed before the demand and cannot be waived by whoever picks up the phone.
Politics and Voting
Constitutional limits. Their entire function is to stop a future government doing what it will badly want to do.
Markets and Money
Central bank independence. The whole point is that the people who would be tempted cannot reach the lever.
Family and Relationships
Money moved to savings on payday automatically. A decision made once, in the calm, about a moment that will not be calm.