Health club attendance, expectations and self-control

Jean-Denis Garon, Alix Masse and Pierre-Carl Michaud

Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 2015, vol. 119, issue C, 364-374

Abstract: We use a unique dataset on health club attendance from Montreal (Canada) to look at the relationship between actual and expected attendance, and how these relate to a reported measure of self-control problems at the time of contract signing. Consistently with previous studies, a vast majority of contract choices are unlikely to be compatible with time-consistent behavior. For 56.83% of members, the actual cost per visit with the contract is higher than the pay-per-visit option. Conditional on paying more with a subscription, we calculate that the median cost of choosing a long-term contract over the per-visit option is $346.45, excluding any commitment value. However, we compute that nearly all members would have paid less with the long-term contract if they had exercised as often as they initially planned. We study how actual attendance following contract choice is related to baseline reports of self-control. We find that reports of self-control problems are associated with low future attendance and with faster decrease in attendance, in particular after New Year, but not with expected attendance. Our results are consistent with a model of health club participation where agents underestimate the severity of their self-control problems. We find that individuals with a large gap between expected and realized attendance have a lower probability of contract renewal which has implications for mechanism design to retain customers.

Keywords: Self-control; Gym attendance; Expectations (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D00 D12 D91 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Health Club Attendance, Expectations and Self-control (2014)
Working Paper: Health Club Attendance, Expectations and Self-Control (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jeborg:v:119:y:2015:i:c:p:364-374

DOI: 10.1016/j.jebo.2015.08.015

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