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

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 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.