Conference registration: how people react to a deadline : Article : Nature Physics

Valentina Alfi, Giorgio Parisi and Luciano Pietronero in their Correspondence in the current issue of Nature Physics ( 3, 746; 2007) draw on their recent experiences of organizing and planning meetings to investigate the behaviour people show when they are asked to register for a conference and provide an abstract. They conclude: “People’s behaviour around a deadline does indeed seem to be universal. If the action is reversible (as is simple registration), the pressure to do it is inversely proportional to the available time before the deadline. For an irreversible action (such as payment), there is a tendency to postpone it until even closer to the deadline, which can be described by a utility function. The rule of thumb to guess the final number of registrants is to consider the extrapolation of the initial linear behaviour and multiply it by three — a result that may be useful for organizers of future events.”

Their data and analysis are shown in the full Correspondence article at the link provided above.