 Get thee to the gym! A field experiment on improving exercise habitsSimon Condliffe, Ebru Işgın and Brynne Fitzgerald Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), 2017, vol. 70, issue C, 23-32 Abstract: We explore the efficacy of a combination of interventions to encourage exercise in a field experiment hosted at a large public university. The experimental groups include individuals and teams and those with and without information about peers. We find that team incentives are associated with greater behavior modification (e.g. more gym visits) than individual incentives. Information on peers’ gym attendance (either in a team or individual setting) also promotes more frequent gym use relative to a simple individual incentive. In addition, being in a team and receiving information on peers are effective in changing a non-user of the gym to a user. We also observe that periodic information feedback has a longer-lasting impact on gym attendance than other interventions. Our findings provide insight for any organization seeking to incentivize behavior change in the most efficient, and cost effective, manner. Keywords: Exercise; Field experiment; Incentives; Teams; Information; Habit formation (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:soceco:v:70:y:2017:i:c:p:23-32 DOI: 10.1016/j.socec.2017.07.007 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) is currently edited by Pablo Brañas Garza More articles in Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics) from Elsevier |
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