Naiveté, Projection Bias, and Habit Formation in Gym Attendance

Dan Acland () and Matthew R. Levy ()
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Dan Acland: University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California 94720
Matthew R. Levy: London School of Economics, London WC2A 2AE, United Kingdom

Management Science, 2015, vol. 61, issue 1, 146-160

Abstract: We implement a gym-attendance incentive intervention and elicit subjects' predictions of their postintervention attendance. We find that subjects greatly overpredict future attendance, which we interpret as evidence of partial naiveté with respect to present bias. We find a significant postintervention attendance increase, which we interpret as habit formation, and which subjects appear not to predict ex ante. These results are consistent with a model of projection bias with respect to habit formation. Neither the intervention incentives, nor the small posttreatment incentives involved in our elicitation mechanism, appear to crowd out existing intrinsic motivation. The combination of naiveté and projection bias in gym attendance can help to explain limited take-up of commitment devices by dynamically inconsistent agents, and points to new forms of contracts. Alternative explanations of our results are discussed.Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.2091 . This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics.

Keywords: behavioral economics; experimental economics; habit formation; present bias; projection bias (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (100)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:61:y:2015:i:1:p:146-160

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