Naiveté, projection bias, and habit formation in gym attendance

Dan Acland and Matthew R. Levy

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

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.

Keywords: behavioral economics; experimental economics; habit formation; present bias; projection bias (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J1 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-pke
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (86)

Published in Management Science, January, 2015, 61(1), pp. 146-160. ISSN: 0025-1909

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:66147

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