Part of what we're doing is getting people to more heavily weigh the delayed benefits," Volpp says. "It will be more painful this week to quit than not, and the benefits are so off in the future. In some sense we're trying to combat procrastination."
In another study people were incentivized to quit smoking by the promise of having their own money returned to them. Dean Karlan, an economist at Yale University and a co-founder of StickK.com conducted research published last October in American Economic Journal: Applied Economics. In the study smokers in the Philippines were offered the chance to deposit money into a noninterest-accruing bank account while they tried to quit with the promise they would get it back if they passed a nicotine and cotinine urine test six months later. If they failed, the money would go to charity.