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Creating Exercise Habits Using Incentives: The Tradeoff between Flexibility and Routinization.

ABSTRACT: Habits involve regular, cue-triggered routines. In a field experiment, we tested whether incentivizing exercise routines-paying participants each time they visit the gym within a planned, daily two-hour window-leads to more persistent exercise than offering flexible incentives-paying participants each day they visit the gym, regardless of timing. Routine incentives generated fewer gym visits than flexible incentives, both during our intervention and after incentives were removed. Even among sub-groups that were experimentally induced to exercise at similar rates during our intervention, recipients of routine incentives exhibited a larger decrease in exercise after the intervention than recipients of flexible incentives.

SUBMITTER: Beshears J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8734590 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Creating Exercise Habits Using Incentives: The Tradeoff between Flexibility and Routinization.

Beshears John J Lee Hae Nim HN Milkman Katherine L KL Mislavsky Robert R Wisdom Jessica J

Management science 20201015 7

Habits involve regular, cue-triggered routines. In a field experiment, we tested whether incentivizing exercise routines-paying participants each time they visit the gym within a planned, daily two-hour window-leads to more persistent exercise than offering flexible incentives-paying participants each day they visit the gym, regardless of timing. Routine incentives generated <i>fewer</i> gym visits than flexible incentives, both during our intervention and after incentives were removed. Even amo ...[more]

PMID: 35001975

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Dataset Information

Creating Exercise Habits Using Incentives: The Tradeoff between Flexibility and Routinization.

Publications

Creating Exercise Habits Using Incentives: The Tradeoff between Flexibility and Routinization.

Similar Datasets

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