Paying people to eat or not to eat?: carryover effects of monetary incentives on eating behaviour

Dolan, Paul, Galizzi, Matteo M. and Navarro-Martínez, Daniel (2015) Paying people to eat or not to eat?: carryover effects of monetary incentives on eating behaviour. Social Science and Medicine, 133 . pp. 153-158. ISSN 0277-9536

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Abstract

There is no evidence comparing head-to-head the effects of monetary incentives to act and to abstain from acting on behaviour. We present an experiment, conducted between June and September 2012, that directly compares the effects of those two different monetary incentive schemes on eating behaviour: we evaluate incentives to eat against incentives not to eat. A large number of participants (n = 353) had bowls of sweets next to them while they watched different videos over two experimental sessions that were two days apart. Sweets eating was monitored and monetary incentives to eat or not to eat were introduced during one of the videos for participants randomly allocated to these conditions. Our results show that, while both types of incentives were effective in changing sweets-eating behaviour when they were in place, only incentives not to eat had significant carryover effects after they were removed. Those effects were still significant two days after the monetary incentives had been eliminated. We also present some additional results on personality and health-related variables that shed further light on these effects. Overall, our study shows that incentives not to eat can be more effective in producing carryover effects on behaviour in domains like the one explored here.

Item Type:	Article
Official URL:	http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/02779...
Additional Information:	© 2015 The Authors.
Library of Congress subject classification:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine
Sets:	Departments > Social Policy Research centres and groups > LSE Health and Social Care
Date Deposited:	21 Apr 2015 14:51
URL:	http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/61674/

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