Could Financial Incentives Help Smokers Kick The Habit?

New findings published in the New England Journal of Medicine show that financial incentives could help smokers quit more so than other preventative measures alone.

Researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania looked at four distinct financial programs and their impact, each worth roughly $800 over six months, to determine which was more successful at getting smokers to quit than programs that provided free access to behavioral counseling and nicotine replacement therapy.

For the study, researchers enrolled over 2,500 participants from across the United States throughout an eight-month period in 2012. Volunteers were assigned to one of five groups, with two of the incentive programs targeted to individuals and two targeted groups of six participants.

"Of the individual and group programs, one of each involved rewards of approximately $800 for smoking cessation; the other entailed refundable deposits of $150 plus $650 in reward payments, if participants were successful," Medscape reported.

From there, those in the control group were offered informational resources and free smoking cessation aids, as well.

"We found that the reward-based programs were more effective than deposits overall because more people accepted them in the first place," Scott D. Halpern, lead author of the study, said in a statement. "However, among people who would have accepted any program we offered them, the deposit contracts were twice as effective as rewards, and five times more effective than free information and nicotine replacement therapy, likely because they leveraged people's natural aversion to losing money. With such unprecedented rates of success, the trick now is to figure out how to get more people to sign up -- to feel like they have skin in the game."