Executive summary: Self-guided mental health apps like Headspace provide significant wellbeing improvements, but remain much less cost-effective than cash transfers due to high operating costs. Reducing these costs could make them competitive.
Key points:
Self-guided apps have a small effect size on depression/anxiety symptoms (0.15-0.31 SD).
This translates to ~0.21 WELLBYs per user at post-test, but few users continue long-term.
User acquisition and development costs are high, making them 1.5-12.7σ less cost-effective than cash transfers.
Reducing hiring needs and marketing to low-CPI regions could significantly improve cost-effectiveness.
Increasing retention rates and effect sizes would also help close the gap with cash transfers.
More research is needed, but there is potential for self-guided apps to become highly cost-effective.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, andcontact us if you have feedback.
Executive summary: Self-guided mental health apps like Headspace provide significant wellbeing improvements, but remain much less cost-effective than cash transfers due to high operating costs. Reducing these costs could make them competitive.
Key points:
Self-guided apps have a small effect size on depression/anxiety symptoms (0.15-0.31 SD).
This translates to ~0.21 WELLBYs per user at post-test, but few users continue long-term.
User acquisition and development costs are high, making them 1.5-12.7σ less cost-effective than cash transfers.
Reducing hiring needs and marketing to low-CPI regions could significantly improve cost-effectiveness.
Increasing retention rates and effect sizes would also help close the gap with cash transfers.
More research is needed, but there is potential for self-guided apps to become highly cost-effective.
This comment was auto-generated by the EA Forum Team. Feel free to point out issues with this summary by replying to the comment, and contact us if you have feedback.