Hengchen Dai

The Fresh Start Effect: Temporal Landmarks Motivate Aspirational Behavior

The popularity of New Year’s resolutions suggests that people are more likely to tackle their goals immediately following salient temporal landmarks. If true, this little-researched phenomenon has the potential to help people overcome important willpower problems that often limit goal attainment. Across three archival field studies, we provide evidence of a “fresh start effect.” We show that Google searches for the term “diet” (Study 1), gym visits (Study 2), and commitments to pursue goals (Study 3) all increase following temporal landmarks (e.g., the outset of a new week, month, year, or semester; a birthday; a holiday). We propose that these landmarks demarcate the passage of time, creating many new mental accounting periods each year, which relegate past imperfections to a previous period, induce people to take a big-picture view of their lives, and thus motivate aspirational behaviors. Data, as supplemental material, are available at http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2014.1901.

The Impact of Time at Work and Time Off From Work on Rule Compliance: The Case of Hand Hygiene in Health Care

To deliver high-quality, reliable, and consistent services safely, organizations develop professional standards. Despite the communication and reinforcement of these standards, they are often not followed consistently. Although previous research suggests that high job demands are associated with declines in compliance over lengthy intervals, we hypothesized-drawing on theoretical arguments focused on fatigue and depletion-that the impact of job demands on routine compliance with professional standards might accumulate much more quickly. To test this hypothesis, we studied a problem that represents one of the most significant compliance challenges in health care today: hand hygiene. Using longitudinal field observations of over 4,157 caregivers working in 35 different hospitals and experiencing more than 13.7 million hand hygiene opportunities, we found that hand hygiene compliance rates dropped by a regression-estimated 8.7 percentage points on average from the beginning to the end of a typical 12-hr work shift. This decline in compliance was magnified by increased work intensity. Further, longer breaks between work shifts increased subsequent compliance rates, and such benefits were greater for individuals when they had ended their preceding shift with a lower compliance rate. In addition, (a) the decline in compliance over the course of a work shift and (b) the improvement in compliance following a longer break increased as individuals accumulated more total work hours the preceding week. The implications of these findings for patient safety and job design are discussed.

Motivating Process Compliance Through Individual Electronic Monitoring: An Empirical Examination of Hand Hygiene in Healthcare

The design and use of standard processes are foundational recommendations in many operations practices. Yet, given the demonstrated performance benefits of standardized processes, it is surprising that they are often not followed consistently. One way to ensure greater compliance is by electronically monitoring the activities of individuals, although such aggressive monitoring poses the risk of inducing backlash. In the setting of hand hygiene in healthcare, a context where compliance with standard processes is frequently less than 50% and where this lack of compliance can result in negative consequences, we investigated the effectiveness of electronic monitoring. We did so using a unique, radio frequency identification (RFID)-based system deployed in 71 hospital units. We found that electronically monitoring individual compliance resulted in a large, positive increase in compliance. We also found that there was substantial variability in the effect across units and that units with higher levels of preact...

Put Your Imperfections Behind You: Temporal Landmarks Spur Goal Initiation When They Signal New Beginnings

People often fail to muster the motivation needed to initiate goal pursuit. Across five laboratory experiments, we explored occasions when people naturally experience enhanced motivation to take actions that facilitate goal pursuit and why certain dates are more likely to spur goal initiation than others. We present causal evidence that emphasizing a temporal landmark denoting the beginning of a new time period increases people’s intentions to initiate goal pursuit. In addition, we propose and show that people’s strengthened motivation to begin pursuing their aspirations following such temporal landmarks originates in part from the psychological disassociation these landmarks induce from a person’s past, imperfect self.

The Value of Pop-Up Stores in Driving Online Engagement in Platform Retailing: Evidence From a Large-Scale Field Experiment With Alibaba

We study the value of short-lived and experientially oriented pop-up stores, a popular type of omnichannel retail strategy, on both retailers that participate in pop-up store events and retailing p...

Vicarious Goal Pursuit Outweighs Herding in Crowdfunding: Evidence from Kickstarter.com

In reward-based crowdfunding, creators of entrepreneurial projects solicit capital from potential consumers to reach a funding goal and offer future products/services in return. We examine consumers’ contribution patterns using a novel dataset of 28,591 projects collected at 30-minute resolution from Kickstarter.com. Extending past research assuming that economic considerations (such as project quality and campaign success likelihood) drive backers’ decisions, we provide the cleanest field evidence so far that consumers also have prosocial motives to help creators reach their funding goals. We find that projects collect funding faster right before (vs. right after) meeting their funding goals because consumers not only are more likely to fund projects, but also contribute greater amounts of money prior to goal attainment. This effect is amplified when the nature of a project tends to evoke consumers’ prosocial motivation and when a project’s creator is a single person. These results suggest that consumers’ prosocial motives not only play a role in reward-based crowdfunding, but also can outweigh the opposing effects of economic factors including rational herding and certainty about campaign success.

The Effect of Interactive Reminders on Medication Adherence: A Randomized Trial

Expanding on evidence that interventions to improve health are more effective when informed by behavioral science, we explore whether reminders designed to harness behavioral science principles can improve medication adherence. We conducted a randomized controlled trial with 46,581 U.S. participants with commercial or Medicare Advantage insurance from Humana. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions. Participants in the usual care condition only received standard mailings that the insurer usually sends. In addition to the standard mailings, participants in the other three conditions also received (1) mailings that reminded them to take a target medication (basic reminder condition), (2) reminders that prompted them to predict their medication adherence in the next 30 days (prediction condition), or (3) reminders that prompted them to commit to a self-determined level of adherence for the next 30 days (commitment condition). We sent these mailings once a month for three months from November, 2014 through January, 2015, and tracked prescription refills. We find that, during the mailing period, reminders increased adherence by 0.95 percentage points (p < 0.05), and this effect was driven by the prediction and commitment conditions; during the three-month post-mailing period, reminders increased adherence by 0.98 percentage points (p < 0.05), and this effect was driven by the basic reminder and commitment conditions. The reminders increased medication adherence by 0.7 pills per dollar spent over our 181 day study period.

The effect of interactive reminders on medication adherence: A randomized trial

Expanding on evidence that interventions to improve health are more effective when informed by behavioral science, we explore whether reminders designed to harness behavioral science principles can improve medication adherence. We conducted a randomized controlled trial with 46,581 U.S. participants with commercial or Medicare Advantage insurance from Humana. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four experimental conditions. Participants in the usual care condition only received standard mailings that the insurer usually sends. In addition to the standard mailings, participants in the other three conditions also received (1) mailings that reminded them to take a target medication (basic reminder condition), (2) reminders that prompted them to predict their medication adherence in the next 30days (prediction condition), or (3) reminders that prompted them to commit to a self-determined level of adherence for the next 30days (commitment condition). We sent these mailings once a month for three months from November, 2014 through January, 2015, and tracked prescription refills. We find that, during the mailing period, reminders increased adherence by 0.95 percentage points (p<0.05), and this effect was driven by the prediction and commitment conditions; during the three-month post-mailing period, reminders increased adherence by 0.98 percentage points (p<0.05), and this effect was driven by the basic reminder and commitment conditions. The reminders increased medication adherence by 0.7 pills per dollar spent over our 181day study period. Trial registry name: Effect of Reminders on Adherence. Registration identification number: NCT02411006 URL for the registry: https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT02411006.

How Do Price Promotions Affect Customer Behavior on Retailing Platforms? Evidence from a Large Randomized Experiment on Alibaba

Dynamic pricing through price promotions has been widely used by online retailers. We study how a promotion strategy, one that offers customers a discount for products in their shopping cart, affec...

Effectiveness of Medication Adherence Reminders Tied to “Fresh Start” Dates: A Randomized Clinical Trial

Low medication adherence is problematic.1 Well-designed reminders can increase adherence,2 but when should reminders be sent to maximize impact? Prior observational studies3 and laboratory experiments4 have shown that engagement in healthy activities increases considerably following “fresh-start” dates—life and calendar events signaling the beginning of new cycles (e.g. birthdays or New Year’s).3,4 Extending this insight, we conducted the first randomized controlled trial (RCT) examining whether sending medication adherence reminders around fresh-start dates and highlighting these dates as an opportunity for positive changes could boost reminders’ effectiveness.