Incentives, Commitments and Habit Formation in Exercise

Professor Justin Sydnor of the School of Business will discuss the results of a large-scale field experiment on the use of financial incentives for exercise among employees at the headquarters of a Fortune 500 company. Preliminary results show strong response to the financial incentives and modest degrees of behavior change even after the incentives are removed, though this habit-formation effect is decidedly weaker than findings from similar experiments with undergraduate populations.