#422 2008 · stickK (Dean Karlan, Ian Ayres) · Behavioral economics / consumer softwarecostly-signal
A donation to charity wasn't enough to make people keep their New Year's resolutions, so stickK let them bet their money on going to an organization they actually despise instead.
the problem
people set goals they genuinely want to achieve but routinely fail to follow through, and standard accountability mechanisms are too easy to walk away from without real cost
background
Standard commitment tools for personal goals — New Year's resolutions, gym memberships, informal promises to friends — routinely fail because the cost of quitting is close to zero: nothing concrete happens if you skip the gym or break the promise, so present-bias wins out over the future benefit almost every time. Behavioral economists Dean Karlan and Ian Ayres had researched commitment devices extensively and found that attaching a real financial stake to a goal measurably improved follow-through, but even standard financial commitment contracts — forfeit money to charity if you fail — often weren't painful enough to change behavior, since losing money to a charity you're at least neutral about doesn't sting as much as losing it to something you actively oppose.
Rather than rely purely on the size of the financial stake, Karlan and Ayres identified a stronger lever: aversion isn't just about losing money, it's about what that money does next. Directing a forfeited stake toward a cause the user personally despises adds a second, non-financial cost on top of the monetary one.
the move
In 2008, Karlan and Ayres launched stickK, a website where users write a binding 'commitment contract' for a personal goal, put up real money as a stake, and — critically — can choose to have any forfeited stake go not to a neutral charity but to a designated 'anti-charity,' an organization on the opposite side of a cause the user cares about (the platform curates paired anti-charities across issues like gun control, abortion, and the environment, so a user can pick the org that would make failure feel worst).
the payoff
stickK's own tracked results found users who staked money were substantially more likely to hit their goals than those who set goals without a financial commitment, and specifically that users who selected an anti-charity as the forfeit destination were roughly 15% more likely to succeed than those who chose to donate to a friend or a neutral charity instead — turning the identity of the recipient, not just the size of the stake, into a measurable behavioral lever.
what came after
stickK is widely cited in behavioral economics as the clearest applied test of commitment-device theory, demonstrating that the emotional valence of a financial penalty's destination matters as much as its size — the anti-charity mechanism has since been adopted or referenced by other habit-tracking and commitment-contract products, and Ayres and Karlan's underlying research became a standard citation in behavioral finance and public health nudge design.
references
- [1]stickK Allows You To Put A Contract On YourselfTechCrunch, 2008techcrunch.com
- [2]The High-Stakes Way To Keep New HabitsFast Company, 2015fastcompany.com