Creating Exercise Habits Using Incentives: The Trade-off Between Flexibility and Routinization

Habits involve regular, cue-triggered routines. In a field experiment, we tested whether incentivizing exercise routines-paying participants each time they visit the gym within a planned, daily two-hour window-leads to more persistent exercise than offering flexible incentives-paying participants each day they visit the gym, regardless of timing. Routine incentives generated <i>fewer</i> gym visits than flexible incentives, both during our intervention and after incentives were removed. Even among sub-groups that were experimentally induced to exercise at similar rates during our intervention, recipients of routine incentives exhibited a larger decrease in exercise after the intervention than recipients of flexible incentives.

• 저널Management Science · 67(7) · 4139–4171
• 토픽Behavioral Health and Interventions · Applied Psychology
• DOI10.1287/mnsc.2020.3706
• 저자John Beshears, Hae Nim Lee, Katherine L. Milkman, Robert Mislavsky, Jessica Wisdom