Behind contingent cash transfer: Using violations of the Fungibility Principle to increase incentives effectiveness in behavior change

近年来，在旨在提高出勤率和成绩、减少吸烟和鼓励锻炼的项目中使用激励措施已变得更加流行。了解激励如何与其他动机相互作用是确保此类项目成功的关键。通常，激励结构的一个小变化就会对结果产生巨大的影响--无论是积极的还是消极的。在这项研究中，研究人员考察了涉及激励的计划可以在多大程度上被设计为在不增加提供激励的实际成本的情况下增加接受者所感知的激励的价值，从而增加激励的回报。只要这些计划重新设计被证明是有效的，它们就可以用于各种重要的社会行为改变努力，从改善健康结果，到减少污染，再到提高生产率和节约。这项研究建立在心理账户理论的基础上。它假定，为了决定如何花钱，人们首先在不同的账户之间在心理上分配资金，然后在每个账户内做出支出决定。这违反了可替代性的经济学原则，即一个心理账户中的货币应该是另一个账户中的货币的完美替代品。在使用激励来帮助人们实现目标的计划的背景下，心理会计意味着可以通过将激励定向到特定的、非常令人满意的心理账户来提高计划的有效性。为了探索这一点，我们提出了两组实验：靶向？假设。一些研究着眼于是否可以通过简单地重新贴上标签或重新包装来解决人们认为特别厌恶的费用的激励问题，从而增加对此类项目的参与。第二组研究考察是否可以通过构建激励条款以在估值过程中触发非货币考虑来增加参与度。

In recent years, the use of incentives in programs intended to increase school attendance and improve grades, reduce smoking, and encourage exercise has become more popular. Understanding how incentives interact with other motivations is a key to assuring the success of such programs. Often, a small change to the incentive structure can have a dramatic impact?positive or negative?on outcomes. In this research, the investigator examines the extent to programs involving incentives can be designed so as to increase the value of the incentive as perceived by recipients without increasing the actual cost of providing the incentive, consequently increasing the return on incentives. To the extent these program re-designs prove effective, they can be used in a variety of socially important behavior-change efforts, from improving health outcomes, to reducing pollution, to increasing productivity and savings. The research builds on ?mental account theory? which posits that to decide how to spend their money, people first mentally allocate their funds between different accounts and then make spending decisions within each account. This results in violation of the economic principle of fungibility by which money in one mental account should be a perfect substitute for money in another account. In the context of programs that use incentives to help people achieve goals, mental accounting implies that program effectiveness can be increased by targeting the incentives to a specific, highly desirable, mental account. Two sets of experiments are proposed to explore this ?targeting? hypothesis. Some studies look at whether participation in such programs can be increased by simply relabeling or repackaging the incentive to address an expense perceived by people as particularly aversive. A second set of studies examines whether participation can be increased by structuring the incentive provision in such a way as to trigger non-monetary considerations in the valuation process.