Stake and pot

What it does in Road Mates

You stake money against a deadline. Each phase you pass returns an equal share of your stake. A phase you cannot pass sends its share to the pot. If you finish, you get your stake back plus a share of the pot, capped at 2× your own stake.

How it works

• Equal split: with five phases, each passed phase returns one fifth.
• Losses fund the pot, and finishers split it.
• The 2× cap keeps the pot from rewarding people for others' failure beyond a fair amount.
• Staking is your choice. The rest of the system works without it.

What the research found

Commitment contracts, where you lose your own money if you miss a target, are a well-known tool. In a large smoking-cessation trial, deposit contracts produced much higher sustained quitting among the people who accepted them than reward-only programs did.

The catch is take-up: only 13.7% of smokers accepted the deposit program, against about 90% for the reward program. In a separate trial in the Philippines, 11% took up a deposit product, and merely being offered it raised the chance of quitting by 3 percentage points, with the effect still there at 12 months.

Limits

• People who accept a stake are already the most motivated, so the effect among takers overstates what it does for everyone.
• Per person offered, the lift is small. We count it as a modest contribution.
• Both studies are about smoking, not long creative or career goals.
• Several of the linked pages are summaries of the original papers.