Deposit? Yes, please! The effect of different modes of assigning reward-and deposit-based financial incentives on effort 303 9 Take-up of deposit-based incentives Using a set of pragmatic decision rules (modelled after Boderie et al.36), we advised respondents that demanded commitment and/or displayed considerable delay discounting/loss aversion to take-up deposit-based incentives (other respondents were advised to take-up reward-based incentives). This advice was implemented as a pre-selection of the advised incentive scheme, i.e., as a default. We find that many individuals display demand for commitment, as well as strong discounting and considerable loss aversion using existing methodology.30, 49 Our estimates for delay discounting as well as their test-retest reliability appear to be in line with previous work.55 Our estimates for loss aversion appear to be slightly larger than previous work,52, 56 and the low test-retest reliability we observe adds to a literature on the (lack of) stability of loss aversion.54, 57 Given the low test-retest reliability, it may seem inadvisable to use loss aversion estimates for assigning incentives, yet in our study, the scheme respondents were defaulted to, using a pragmatic approach similar to Boderie et al.36 would have been the same across test and retest for a large majority of respondents. Take-up of these default schemes was high, 100% for reward-based incentive schemes and a considerable 44% for deposit-based incentive schemes. In other words, nearly half of our respondents elected to voluntarily deposit part of the money they earned in order to commit themselves to complete more sliders, even though no matching was applied. Take-up of deposit-based incentives in our study is larger than in some published studies using deposit-based incentives without matching,22, 24, 32 in line with the high hypothetical take-up typically found in lab-based studies.29, 30 Carrera et al.33 however, estimated that the average takeup rate of deposit contracts for earned money, as in our study, was 47%, i.e., quite close to the take-up in this study. This would imply that the use of defaults appears to add little to take-up of deposit-based incentives, in contrast to what was suggested in work done with commercially available deposit-based incentives i.e., on www.stickk.com.42, 43 Yet, another treatment arm with voluntary choice without a default would be needed to draw this conclusion. Predicting take-up of deposit-based incentives Although the advice to take-up deposit-based incentives was based on discounting, loss aversion and demand for commitment, only the latter was associated with take-up (when ignoring drop-out). These results are in accordance with work by Lipman,30 who also found no association between discounting and loss aversion
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