Like Adding a Small Weight to a Scale About to Tip: Personalizing Micro-Financial Incentives for Digital Wellbeing

Personalized behavior change interventions can be effective as they dynamically adapt to an individual's context. Financial incentives, a commonly used intervention in commercial applications and policy-making, offer a mechanism for creating personalized micro-interventions that are both quantifiable and amenable to systematic evaluation. However, the effectiveness of such personalized micro-financial incentives in real-world settings remains largely unexplored. In this study, we propose a personalization strategy that dynamically adjusts the amount of micro-financial incentives to promote smartphone use regulation and explore its efficacy and user experience through a four-week, in-the-wild user study. The results demonstrate that the proposed method is highly cost-effective without compromising intervention effectiveness. Based on these findings, we discuss the role of micro-financial incentives in enhancing awareness, design considerations for personalized micro-financial incentive systems, and their potential benefits and limitations concerning motivation change.

• Human-centered computing → Empirical studies in ubiquitous and mobile computing.