Daniel Mochon

Healthier by Precommitment

We tested a voluntary self-control commitment device to help grocery shoppers make healthier food purchases. Participants, who were already enrolled in a large-scale incentive program that discounts the price of eligible groceries by 25%, were offered the chance to put their discount on the line. Agreeing households pledged that they would increase their purchases of healthy food by 5 percentage points above their household baseline for each of 6 months. If they reached that goal, their discount was awarded as usual; otherwise, their discount was forfeited for that month. Thirty-six percent of households that were offered the binding commitment agreed; they subsequently showed an average 3.5-percentage-point increase in healthy grocery items purchased in each of the 6 months; households that declined the commitment and control-group households that were given a hypothetical option to precommit did not show such an increase. These results suggest that self-aware consumers will seize opportunities to create restrictive choice environments for themselves, even at some risk of financial loss.

Characterizing perceptions of energy consumption

The adoption of energy-saving technologies is presumably deterred by underestimates of energy use and by corresponding underestimates of the difference between more- and less-efficient appliances. Thus, it is easy to grasp the potential policy significance of a recent study (1) concluding that Americans underestimate energy use by a factor of 2.8.

What Are Likes Worth? A Facebook Page Field Experiment

Despite the tremendous resources devoted to marketing on Facebook, little is known about its actual effect on customers. Specifically, can Facebook page likes affect offline customer behavior, and if so, how? To answer these questions, the authors conduct a field experiment on acquired Facebook page likes and find them to have a positive causal effect on offline customer behavior. Importantly, these likes are found to be most effective when the Facebook page is used as a platform for firm-initiated promotional communications. No effect of acquired page likes is found when customers interact organically with the firms page, but a significant effect is found when the firm pays to boost its page posts and thus uses its Facebook page as a platform for paid advertising. These results demonstrate the value of likes beyond Facebook activity itself and highlight the conditions under which acquiring likes is most valuable for firms.

Gain Without Pain: The Extended Effects of a Behavioral Health Intervention

We examine the extended effects of an incentive-based behavioral health intervention designed to improve nutrition behavior. Although the intervention successfully improved the target behavior, less is known about any spillovers, positive or negative, that impacted the program’s net benefit. This novel examination presents an opportunity to advance our knowledge of this important question, particularly because many theories predict that balancing behaviors in other domains (e.g., reduced exercise) can occur. Our results show a positive and long-lasting persistence effect for the treatment group, even after the incentive was removed. Moreover, we observe no negative spillover effects into related domains such as exercise, and no negative impact on customer loyalty. These results support the use of incentive-based interventions and highlight the importance, for both theory and practice, of examining their extended effects. This paper was accepted by Uri Gneezy, behavioral economics .