Chapter 9 282 offers opportunities for sophisticated individuals to commit themselves to future actions,35, 37 e.g., by allowing individuals to self-select into more challenging incentive schemes or to help them persevere. Other studies, however, have found that, on balance, those that had the opportunity to choose their own incentive scheme perform the same or worse than those randomly assigned to incentives.29, 34, 40 Our work follows up on the suggestion for future research put forward by Adjerid et al.29 who suggest to nudge individuals towards potentially beneficial incentive schemes. That is, we default (a selection of) respondents into deposit-based incentives, which may help promote their take-up when free choice exists. Indeed, other related studies have found default settings to affect uptake in commercially available deposit-based incentives i.e., on www.stickk. com.42, 43 Opt-out deposit-based incentive designs were also used in Erev et al.25 who found they were effective and taken up by up to 55% of their sample. Second, by randomly assigning deposit-based incentives in one treatment arm, our study enables to estimate the effect of deposit-based incentives over rewardbased incentives without having to worry about the self-selection of individuals into deposit-based incentives. In addition, we randomly varied the size of the reward. As such, our work contributes to an existing literature that has compared the effectiveness of reward- and deposit-based incentives as well as incentives of different sizes. Typically, diminishing or no effects of increasing financial incentive size are found. e.g.13, 14, 44 Studies on health behaviour change that randomize respondents to deposit-based incentives (i.e., punishment) over reward-based incentives have found mixed effects,18, 21, 26, 27 and our study could help interpret mixed results in earlier work. Third, by studying the characteristics of individuals opting-in and opting-out of deposit-based incentives in the treatment arm that combined a nudge with voluntary choice, we contribute to the understanding of the self-selection of individuals into deposit-based incentives. So far, the available evidence suggests that take-up of deposit-based incentives is higher among men and individuals with higher income.45 Furthermore, some studies suggest that preference for immediate rewards (i.e., present bias) is associated with take-up of deposit-based incentives.32, 46 Lipman,30 however, found no such evidence, and furthermore, hypothetical take-up of deposit-based incentives was not associated with loss aversion. This is perhaps surprising, as one may also expect that take-up and/ or effectiveness of deposit-based incentives is associated with loss aversion.
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