Incentivizing Commuter Cycling by Financial and Non-Financial Rewards

Vojtěch Máca, Milan Ščasný (), Iva Zverinova, Michal Jakob and Jan Hrnčíř
Additional contact information
Vojtěch Máca: Environment Centre, Charles University, 162 00 Prague, Czech Republic
Michal Jakob: FEE, Artificial Intelligence Center, Czech Technical University in Prague, 121 35 Prague, Czech Republic
Jan Hrnčíř: Umotional s.r.o., 120 00 Prague, Czech Republic

IJERPH, 2020, vol. 17, issue 17, 1-14

Abstract: Current mobility patterns over-rely on transport modes that do not benefit sustainable and healthy lifestyles. To explore the potential for active mobility, we conducted a randomized experiment aimed at increasing regular commuter cycling in cities. In designing the experiment, we teamed up with developers of the “Cyclers” smartphone app to improve the effectiveness of the app by evaluating financial and non-financial motivational features. Participants in the experiment were recruited among new users of the app, and were randomly assigned to one of four different motivational treatments (smart gamification, two variants of a financial reward, and a combination of smart gamification and a financial reward) or a control group (no specific motivation). Our analysis suggests that people can be effectively motivated to engage in more frequent commuter cycling with incentives via a smartphone app. Offering small financial rewards seems to be more effective than smart gamification. A combination of both motivational treatments—smart gamification and financial rewards—may work the same or slightly better than financial rewards alone. We demonstrate that small financial rewards embedded in smartphone apps such as “Cyclers” can be effective in nudging people to commute by bike more often.

Keywords: active mobility; randomized experiment; behavioral change; incentives; smartphone app (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I I1 I3 Q Q5 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/17/6033/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1660-4601/17/17/6033/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jijerp:v:17:y:2020:i:17:p:6033-:d:401064

Access Statistics for this article

IJERPH is currently edited by Ms. Jenna Liu

More articles in IJERPH from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().