Does abandoning games preserve your ELO rating on Chess.com?

As I improve my ELO on chess.com, I've found that more and more opponents abandon the game once they find themselves in a losing position. My first guess is that this preserves their ELO score, and at higher ratings, players are more concerned about protecting their ranking, and thus this happens more often - otherwise why would this be happening more frequently with higher ELO rated players?