Hard vs. soft commitments: Experimental evidence from a sample of French gamblers

Paul Bettega, Paolo Crosetto, Dimitri Dubois and Rustam Romaniuc

Working Papers from Grenoble Applied Economics Laboratory (GAEL)

Abstract: People use commitment devices to formalize and facilitate their goals. Self-commitments are ubiquitous and may take different forms: soft, when the commitment can be broken at a low cost, or hard, when that cost is high. The effects of soft and hard commitments have usually been studied separately. We conduct an online experiment with 1527 individuals representative of a big gambling company’s client population to study the comparative effects of hard and soft commitment devices in a risk taking game. Our results show that asking for a hard limit leads subjects to reduce their risk-taking even when the limit turns out to be non-binding, i.e., the commitment is ex-post soft. Hard commitments lead to slightly lower levels of risk taking.

Keywords: Soft Commitment; Hard Commitment; Risk Taking; Self-Control (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D02 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 30 pages
Date: 2023-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://gael.univ-grenoble-alpes.fr/sites/default/ ... 2023/gael2023-05.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Hard vs. soft commitments: Experimental evidence from a sample of French gamblers (2024)
Working Paper: Hard vs. soft commitments: Experimental evidence from a sample of French gamblers * (2023)
Working Paper: Hard vs. soft commitments: Experimental evidence from a sample of French gamblers * (2023)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gbl:wpaper:2023-05

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from Grenoble Applied Economics Laboratory (GAEL) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Adrien Hervouet ().