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Naiveté, Projection Bias, and Habit Formation in Gym Attendance

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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)

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.

Suggested Citation

  • Dan Acland & Matthew R. Levy, 2015. "Naiveté, Projection Bias, and Habit Formation in Gym Attendance," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 61(1), pages 146-160, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:61:y:2015:i:1:p:146-160
    DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2014.2091
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    References listed on IDEAS

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