Gyms experiment with incentivization

Given my obvious interest in obsession with the topic of incentives, I was interested by this Boston Globe article (a couple of weeks old, but new to me).

Every year, we resolve to hit the gym more often and get fit. And by the end of January, many of us have missed workouts or given up altogether.

According to Yifan Zhang, a 2010 graduate of Harvard College, part of the problem is that customers see gym membership fees as money spent, or “a sunk cost, especially if you pay at the beginning of the year.’’ That prompted the idea for Gym-Pact in Boston, which she created with Harvard classmate Geoff Oberhofer.

Gym-Pact offers what Zhang calls motivational fees — customers agree to pay more if they miss their scheduled workouts, literally buying into a financial penalty if they don’t stick to their fitness plans. The concept arose from Zhang’s behavioral economics class at Harvard, where professor Sendhil Mullainathan taught that people are more motivated by immediate consequences than by future possibilities.

Zhang and Oberhofer translated that principle to workout motivation. If missing a workout cost people money, they’d be more motivated to stick with it, they thought.

In general, I tend to think that people respond more powerfully to incentives (positive inducements) than they do to punishments (negative impacts)--hence the proliferation of white-collar crime. But the immediacy dynamic that is cited in this piece is interesting and important--people respond to incentives most powerfully when the payoff is immediate, less so when it is delayed. That psychological tendency in large part describes the puzzle of why people (in general) do not work out more often.

I think that testing a concept like Gym-Pact suffers from some design problems (specifically, self-selection bias), given that it would take a very unique type of gym-goer to opt in to such a program. That is to say, the people most likely to choose to sign up for such a program are those who are most likely to remain vigilant about their workouts--a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. I'd be surprised if anyone who knew (or suspected) themselves to be lazy or fickle about their workout schedule would choose such a program, knowing that there was a high likelihood of a financial punishment. But it's an interesting concept nonetheless.

[Boston Globe]