Why Pledges?

Pledges provide a new way to challenge yourself with meaningful incentives, building on a growing body of supportive research from the field of behavioral economics, while also enabling data ownership as a "Game with a Purpose."

Onchain Accountability

Pledges effectively function as an accountability app with financial stakes. We think this is compelling because it leverages key principles from behavioral economics and nudging theory. First, the concept of loss aversion, where people prefer avoiding losses over acquiring gains, plays a key role. By putting money down on achieving a goal, users are highly motivated to avoid its loss, thus increasing their commitment and making the goal matter more to them. Pledges also act as a credible commitment device, helping individuals align long-term goals with short-term actions, avoiding the pitfalls of present-biased behavior.

Nudging theory further supports Pledges' effectiveness. By subtly influencing users' decisions, Pledges can encourage users to set realistic goals, choose appropriate stakes, and select meaningful beneficiaries like charities. The immediate financial consequences for failing to meet goals counteract procrastination, providing strong motivation to achieve them. And even if users fail, their money is donated to charity, creating a positive outcome. This combination makes Pledges a powerful tool for enhancing personal motivation and achieving personal goals.

Accountability Tools are Both Useful & Desired

At times, humans can simply struggle with self-control and their future accountability. Of course, there are plenty of anecdotal examples of failed new year's resolutions—but even empirical research supports this. A well-known study from Della Vigna and Malmendier titled "Paying Not to Go to the Gym" (2006) studied gym membership and attendance decisions from thousands of gym-(no)goers. They showed that low-attendance members still opted for a yearly membership even when it would have made more sense for them to have simply bought day passes, once they tallied up their total yearly visits. These results point to a common tendency for humans to be overconfident when predicting their future behavior, like their expected number of trips to the gym, without some accountability device.

At the same time, there are plenty of examples of popular products today that successfully nudge their users into developing good habits. For example, Apple lets users monitor and limit screen time on their iPhones and iPads, while Duolingo has famously perfected the daily streak of users' completed lessons to help them stay committed to their language learning goals. We believe Pledges are a new application in this category, combining the very best insights from behavioral economics, gamification, and blockchain-based economic incentive mechanisms.

Pledges as "Games with a Purpose" (GWAP)

We also think Pledges can effectively be categorized into what is known as a Game with a Purpose (GWAP). The concept of GWAPs was first introduced by the crowdsourcing and CAPTCHA pioneer and Duolingo co-founder & CEO, Luis Von Ahn. GWAPs are applications that serve a dual purpose of being immediately enjoyable and useful to the player while also producing outputs that are useful to computational systems (like data that is used to train ML models).

In the case of Pledges, they surface users’ data, which can then be optionally listed on our data marketplace and utilized in innovative ways to address real-world problems.