title: Paying people to eat or not to eat? Carryover effects of monetary incentives on eating behaviour.
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.
authors: London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Social Policy, LSE Health, Houghton Street, WC2A2AE London, UK; Centre for the Study of Incentives in Health, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, Guy's Hospital, St Thomas Street, SE1 9RT London, UK.
authors: Paul
authors: P
authors: Dolan
authors: London School of Economics and Political Science, Department of Social Policy, LSE Health, Houghton Street, WC2A2AE London, UK; Centre for the Study of Incentives in Health, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, Guy's Hospital, St Thomas Street, SE1 9RT London, UK; Paris School of Economics-École d'Économie de Paris, Hospinnomics, Hôtel-Dieu, 1, Parvis de Notre-Dame, Bâtiment B1, 5° étage, 75004 Paris, France. Electronic address: m.m.galizzi@lse.ac.uk.
authors: Matteo M
authors: MM
authors: Galizzi
authors: Centre for the Study of Incentives in Health, Institute of Psychiatry, King's College London, Guy's Hospital, St Thomas Street, SE1 9RT London, UK; Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Departament d'Economia i Empresa, Barcelona Graduate School of Economics, and Barcelona School of Management, Ramon Trias Fargas 25-27, 08005 Barcelona, Spain.
authors: Daniel
authors: D
authors: Navarro-Martinez
mesh_terms: D060909:Economics, Behavioral; D005247:Feeding Behavior / Q000523:psychology*; D006801:Humans; D007389:Internal-External Control; D009042:Motivation; D012201:Reward
keywords: Behavioural economics; Carryover effects; Crowding out of intrinsic motivation; Eating behaviour; Experimental economics; Monetary incentives; Obesity; United Kingdom