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Can Financial Incentives Help People Trying to Establish New Habits? Experimental Evidence with New Gym Members / Mariana Carrera, Heather Royer, Mark Stehr, Justin Sydnor.
- Format:
- Book
- Author/Creator:
- Carrera, Mariana.
- Series:
- Working Paper Series (National Bureau of Economic Research) no. w23567.
- NBER working paper series no. w23567
- Language:
- English
- Physical Description:
- 1 online resource: illustrations (black and white);
- Place of Publication:
- Cambridge, Mass. National Bureau of Economic Research 2017.
- Summary:
- We conducted a randomized controlled trial testing the effect of modest incentives to attend the gym among new members of a fitness facility, a population that is already engaged in trying to change a health behavior. Our experiment randomized 836 new members of a private gym into a control group, receiving a $30 payment unconditionally, or one of 3 incentive groups, receiving a payment if they attended the gym at least 9 times over their first 6 weeks as members. The incentives were a $30 payment, a $60 payment, and an item costing $30 that leveraged the endowment effect. These incentives had only moderate impacts on attendance during members' first 6 weeks and no effect on their subsequent visit trajectories. We document substantial overconfidence among new members about their likely visit rates and discuss how overconfidence may undermine the effectiveness of a modest incentive program.
- Notes:
- Print version record
- July 2017.
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