Effective Strategy of Financial Incentive for Exercise Adherence

Abstract

Financial incentive is a popular intervention approach to motivating individuals to engage in health behaviors such as physical activity. Traditional strategies of financial incentive include to offer constant, decreasing, and increasing rewards over time conditioned on achieving a daily or weekly behavior goal. But such simple strategies could take a wasted shot of incentive at those who are temporally highly-motivated, or fail to offer incentives enough to motivate inactive individuals. Therefore, much remains to be explored to find sophisticated incentive strategies for exercise adherence. In this paper, by focusing on a psychological determinant called self-efficacy, we investigate cost-effective incentive strategies for maintaining a recommended level of physical activity. We analyze a field experiment data of 9-week walking program, and propose a probabilistic model that mimics a participant's behavior in the walking program. Through a simulation study with the proposed model, we show that a more effective incentive strategy than conventional approaches could be found.