If on the morning of a beemergency you realize that you will only be able to make it halfway to the absolute minium the “rational” thing to do is to not even do that because you will derail either way. This got me thinking about partial derails, when you get halfway to resolving your beemergency you only pay half your pledge. In a way this is an extrapolation of Beeminder’s philosophy of turning lumpy incentives to make lumpy progress into incremental incentives to make incremental progress. Going from pledge sized incentives and daily progress to cent sized incentives and fractions of daily progress.
Looking back at my own derailments there would have been instances where I wasn’t motivated to do everything needed to save 5 bucks because that felt overwhelming but would have done a few minutes more to save a few cents. Maybe this would even have lead to me not derailing after all by repeated application of this “just a few minutes more aren’t that bad”.
For goals with a post derail respite this would lead to the new incentive problem of do 99% of the bare min, pay 1% of the pledge, get all of the post derail respite. This can be solved by also applying the post derail respite proportionally. This might even be worth it on its own since it makes the breathing room I get after a derail more proportional to how much I struggled with the goal.
There is also the question of if this makes sense financially for Beeminder as this will on average decrease the revenue they make from a derailment. On the other hand knowing that you don’t have to pay the full pledge if you partially do the bare min might lead to more ambitious goal settings. This plus partial post derail respite would lead to more frequent derails, hopefully making it not a revenue negative feature.