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  • July 2021
  • Article
  • Management Science

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

By: John Beshears, Hae Nim Lee, Katherine L. Milkman, Robert Mislavsky and Jessica Wisdom
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Abstract

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.

Keywords

Behavior And Behavioral Decision Making; Healthcare; Exercise; Habit; Routine; Health; Behavior; Decision Making

Citation

Beshears, John, Hae Nim Lee, Katherine L. Milkman, Robert Mislavsky, and Jessica Wisdom. "Creating Exercise Habits Using Incentives: The Trade-off Between Flexibility and Routinization." Management Science 67, no. 7 (July 2021): 4139–4171.
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About The Author

John Beshears

Negotiation, Organizations & Markets
→More Publications

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More from the Authors
  • Automating Short-Term Payroll Savings: Initial Evidence from a Large U.K. Experiment By: Sarah Holmes Berk, John Beshears, James J. Choi and David Laibson
  • How to Choose a Default By: John Beshears, Richard T. Mason and Shlomo Benartzi
  • Present Bias Causes and Then Dissipates Auto-enrollment Savings Effects By: John Beshears, James J. Choi, David Laibson and Peter Maxted
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