EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Getting more people on the stairs: The impact of point-of-decision prompts

Olivier Allais, Pascale Bazoche and Sabrina Teyssier

Social Science & Medicine, 2017, vol. 192, issue C, 18-27

Abstract: Individuals rarely achieve investment activities characterised by up-front costs and delayed benefits. Point-of-decision prompts (PDPs) provide information about a better alternative or a deterrent to the behavioural standard at the moment the decision is made and may affect behaviour by helping individuals perform this type of investment activities. We conducted a field experiment to assess the effects of a PDP intervention that encourages taking the stairs rather than the escalator in three Paris (France) Metro stations for eight weeks from April to July 2014. In total, we followed up 205 individuals and the data show that PDPs have an immediate, albeit decaying, peaked effect on individuals' stair use, with a stronger effect when weak physical effort is made salient. However, the intervention did not change individuals’ stair-use habits. In the best-case scenario, the effects last two weeks after the intervention ends. Our preferred explanation is that PDPs act as “cues” but people become accustomed to them and in the end no longer notice them. These findings suggest that a PDP intervention is not sufficient to modify individuals investment in activities with immediate costs and delayed benefits in the long-run.

Keywords: France; Physical activity promotion; Stair climbing; Randomised field experiment; Message framing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277953617305403
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Getting more people on the stairs: The impact of point-of-decision prompts (2017)
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:eee:socmed:v:192:y:2017:i:c:p:18-27

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/supportfaq.cws_home/regional
http://www.elsevier. ... _01_ooc_1&version=01

DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2017.09.006

Access Statistics for this article

Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian

More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-19
Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:192:y:2017:i:c:p:18-27