Would you prefer to get $0.10 for sure, or a 0.01% chance of getting $1,000 for every bottle recycled? My PhD student extraordinaire Jade Radke tested it with people in British Columbia and Alberta by setting up recycling tables and asking people to return beverage containers. We find that people much prefer the chance to win $1,000 over the sure $0.10; they feel happier about the opportunity to get money; and they bring 47% more bottles to recycle when the probabilistic option is offered! Our work offers interesting policy implications for current beverage container recycling programs in Canada. This builds on the Nobel-Prize winning work by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, showing that probabilistic rewards may be more motivating than small certain gains in getting people to recycle. The only country in the world that has a similar recycling lottery is Norway and their bottle return rate is close to 100%! The probabilistic refund could be their secret sauce. Hope Canada can adopt this innovative idea as well! See our newly published paper here: sciencedirect.com/science/ar…