Pump

Pump is the balloon risk game from trading-firm cognitive assessments, built on the research literature’s balloon risk task. Each pump adds money to a round balance; cash in to bank it, or keep pumping and risk the pop that wipes the round. It measures risk appetite, learning from losses, and how you adjust after a setback: the traits the real assessments care about most.

Each balloon has a breakpoint drawn fairly from 1 to 128, without replacement across the session, so across many balloons the distribution is uniform and learnable. The chance the next pump pops the balloon rises as you go: 1 in 128 on the first pump, 1 in 2 by pump 127. Nothing about your pumping style changes the draw.

Manual mode is 30 balloons at 10 cents a pump, popping just loses the round balance. Stakes mode is 20 balloons at 20 cents, a pop also deducts half of the round’s accrued value from your bank, and you commit to a pump target up front and the balloon auto-pumps to it. The up-front commitment gives an unbiased measure of intended risk. Stakes mode is available with a premium subscription.

In Manual mode the expected-value optimum is 64 pumps per balloon: most people stop in the 20s and 30s, leaving substantial money on the table. Early balloons are worth deliberately pushing to a pop: that is price discovery, and it is the only way to learn where the ceiling sits. In Stakes mode the pop penalty pulls the optimum lower; the results screen shows your gap to the optimum for the mode you played.

Two different things, reported separately: how much you banked (performance), and your risk propensity: the adjusted average pumps across cashed-in balloons, plus how your pumping changed right after a pop versus after a cash-in. Earnings and risk appetite are confounded in this design: risk-takers land nearer the earnings optimum, so read the money and the propensity numbers as separate results.