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

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Beshears, John; Lee, Hae Nim; Milkman, Katherine L.; Mislavsky, Robert; Wisdom, Jessica
• 署名单位: Harvard University; University of Pennsylvania; Johns Hopkins University; Alphabet Inc.; Google Incorporated
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2020.3706
• 发表日期: 2021
• 页码: 4139-4171
• 关键词: economics; behavior and behavioral decision making; Healthcare; exercise; habit; routine

摘要

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 fewer gym visits than flexible incentives, both during our intervention and after incentives were removed. Even among subgroups 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.