Summary 414 on the long term differs per person. Financial incentives can be used to make such distant effects more attractive in the short term. It is however unclear to whom and how different incentives should be assigned. In Chapter 9, the effect of different modes of assigning reward- and deposit-based financial incentives on effort was explored in a two-session experiment. First, students’ (n = 228, recruited online) discounting, loss aversion and willingness to pay a deposit were elicited. Second, an incentivized real-effort task was completed (n = 171, 25% drop-out). Two modes of assigning reward- or deposit-based financial incentives were compared: random assignment and ‘nudged’ assignment – assignment advice based on respondent characteristics allowing opting out. Respondents receiving nudged assignment earned more and persisted longer on the realeffort task than respondents randomly assigned to incentives. We found no differences in effectiveness between reward-based or deposit-based incentives. Overall, 39% of respondents in the nudged assignment mode followed-up the advice to take deposit-based incentives. The effect of deposit-based incentives was larger for the respondents who followed-up the advice than for respondents that randomly received deposit-based incentives. Overall, these findings suggest that nudged assignment may increase incentives’ positive effect on effort. This was further explored in relation to incentivising smoking cessation in the next chapters. The idea of matching personal characteristics and different types of incentives was further developed in Chapter 10 and Chapter 11. The PERSIST study aimed at investigating the effect of personalised incentives in addition to a group-based smoking cessation training among healthcare employees. Both the intervention and the control group received a group-based smoking cessation training. Based on individual characteristics, intervention group participants were advised - but were free to choose from - one of four incentive schemes with incentives provided following completion of the training and at 3, 6, and 12 months, respectively: (1) Standard; (2) Descending; (3) Ascending; and (4) Deposit. The control group received no incentives. The primary endpoint was continuous smoking cessation at 12 months. Unfortunately the study was halted due to recruitment issues after inclusion of only 31 participants at four hospitals. In the intervention arm, 14 out of 17 participants followed the personally advised incentive scheme and 10 chose the deposit scheme. Abstinence at 12 months was 41% in the intervention and 43% in the control group. Given the recruitment issues, we extended our initial aim to also explore the considerations of potentially eligible non-participants
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