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

Journal article

John Beshears, Hae Nim Lee, Katherine Milkman, Robert Mislavsky, Jessica Wisdom
Management Science, vol. 67(7), 2021, pp. 4139-4171

DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2020.3706

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APA Click to copy
Beshears, J., Lee, H. N., Milkman, K., Mislavsky, R., & Wisdom, J. (2021). Creating Exercise Habits Using Incentives: The Tradeoff between Flexibility and Routinization. Management Science, 67(7), 4139–4171. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2020.3706

Chicago/Turabian Click to copy
Beshears, John, Hae Nim Lee, Katherine Milkman, Robert Mislavsky, and Jessica Wisdom. “Creating Exercise Habits Using Incentives: The Tradeoff between Flexibility and Routinization.” Management Science 67, no. 7 (2021): 4139–4171.

MLA Click to copy
Beshears, John, et al. “Creating Exercise Habits Using Incentives: The Tradeoff between Flexibility and Routinization.” Management Science, vol. 67, no. 7, 2021, pp. 4139–71, doi:10.1287/mnsc.2020.3706.

BibTeX Click to copy

@article{john2021a,
  title = {Creating Exercise Habits Using Incentives: The Tradeoff between Flexibility and Routinization},
  year = {2021},
  issue = {7},
  journal = {Management Science},
  pages = {4139-4171},
  volume = {67},
  doi = {10.1287/mnsc.2020.3706},
  author = {Beshears, John and Lee, Hae Nim and Milkman, Katherine and Mislavsky, Robert and Wisdom, Jessica}
}

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 subgroups 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.