Creating Exercise Habits Using Incentives: The Trade-off Between Flexibility and Routinization
Open accessAbstract
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. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, decision analysis.
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Developing a routine and reducing the number of active decisions toward a change can help ease the transition to physical activity.
“Developing a routine and reducing the number of active decisions towards a change can also help ease the transition.”
From The Impact of Physical Activity in Patients With Type 2 Diabetes (2025) · cites this paper as [117]
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- Authors
- Beshears, J., Lee, H. N., Milkman, K. L., Mislavsky, R., & Wisdom, J.
- Affiliations
- Harvard University (US)
- University of Pennsylvania (US)
- Johns Hopkins University (US)
- Google (United States) (US)
- Venue
- Management Science
- Published
- 2021-07
- Volume
- 67
- Issue
- 7
- Pages
- 4139-4171
- ISSN
- 0025-1909 (ISSN-L)
- 1526-5501
- PMC
- PMC8734590
- OpenAlex
- W3093172502
- Cited by
- 58
- References
- 32
- Citations by year
- 2026: 8 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 13 · 2023: 9 · 2022: 7 · 2021: 7 · 2020: 5 · 2019: 1 · 2017: 1
- FWCI
- 5.15
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Management Science (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- National Institute on Aging (P01AG005842, P30AG034546, P30AG034532)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › General Decision Sciences › Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Applied Psychology › Behavioral Health and Interventions
- Social Sciences › Safety Research › Experimental Behavioral Economics Studies
- Keywords
- exercise habits, habit formation, habit persistence, gym attendance, habit disruption, behavioral incentives
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