City Research Online

Abstract

Individuals often have difficulty saving money because they discount the long-term benefits of saving. Thus, they prefer the immediate pleasure of spending over the delayed reward of having savings. We hypothesize that the use of gamification can increase one’s propensity to save by adding immediate psychological rewards to an otherwise unpleasant behavior such as saving. In a field study, we tested whether a gamified version of a web app to track savings enhanced participants’ likelihood to achieve their saving goal compared to a control (non-gamified) version of the same web app. In the study, participants initially set a saving goal to be achieved in four weeks. They were then randomly assigned to either the gamified or the control version of a web app on which they logged any savings toward their goal over the four-week period. Our results showed that participants in the gamified condition were more likely to achieve their saving goal than participants in the control condition.

Publication Type:	Monograph (Technical Report)
Additional Information:	This report has been published by Think Forward Initiative
Publisher Keywords:	Gamification, saving behavior, intertemporal choice, game elements, immediate rewards
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > HA Statistics H Social Sciences > HB Economic Theory
Departments:	Bayes Business School > Management

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