Creating Exercise Habits Using Incentives: The Trade-off Between Flexibility and Routinization
通过现场实验比较常规化激励（固定时间窗口内锻炼给奖励）与灵活激励（任意时间锻炼给奖励）对锻炼习惯的影响，发现灵活激励在干预期间和之后都更有效。
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.