Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist and author of Predictably Irrational, writes about irrational decision making, pricing, and procrastination.
Commenters recommend his book and posts as interesting accounts of how people act irrationally, citing his deadline experiment and a post on benign manipulation.
No. It's a solution in search of a problem. There are plenty of businesses that would like to receive micropayments, but time after time customers have rejected them. Even if you somehow created a system that was absolutely seamless and required zero effort on the part of the user, you'd still have to convince people that they actually want to make micropayments.
The trouble is that if you set a price that is very nearly free then you are inevitably competing with actually really free. Dan Ariely's research has shown that customers massively overvalue anything free. Customers overwhelmingly prefer a free good to a good at any price, even when there is a significant difference in quality. No experimenter thus far has managed to break this natural gravity towards free in preference to any price. Add in the inevitable friction of the act of payment and you've got an overwhelming barrier to entry that without fail drives the mass of the market towards free alternatives.
There have been a litany of failed micropayment services, all of whom failed for the same reason - rather than doing the Agile thing and finding out what the customer wanted, they tried to impose a 'great idea' on a market that has consistently rejected it. Why exactly are you going to succeed where dozens have failed? What are you going to do differently?
http://www.predictablyirrational.com/pdfs/zerofree.pdf
http://www.shirky.com/writings/fame_vs_fortune.html
It's a bit of a misleading title, it's not all about procrastination and it's not much of a howto either.
It's about how you can do many things better than standard economics would indicated if you take into account the irrationality of human beings.
For example, everyone leaves reports to the last minute. Commiting to earlier deadlines makes no sense to a 'rational' human being, but can help actual human beings.
Here's a link to his research paper on this topic:
http://www.predictablyirrational.com/pdfs/deadlines.pdf
And his book site: http://www.predictablyirrational.com/
If you've never read the book Predictably Irrational there is an interesting chapter regarding a professor who performed an experiment with deadlines for his 3 papers due in the semester.
[simplified]
Class 1: Set your own deadlines
Class 2: Strict deadlines from the professor
Class 3: No deadlines
Guess who performed best? Strict deadlines.
[edit]
Also, I highly recommend the book : http://www.predictablyirrational.com/
Not all manipulation is evil - on the contrary, all sorts of everyday manipulation is entirely benign and positive in nature. See e.g. http://www.predictablyirrational.com/?p=235
I saw this subject mentioned in Dan Ariely's Ted Talks. Here's his specific blog post about the subject. It would clearly work.
http://www.predictablyirrational.com/?p=235
Note the homepage for the book: http://www.predictablyirrational.com/
has a 'reseach' section where you can download many if not all of the original papers.