TY - GEN
T1 - Strategic behavior in mobile behavioral intervention platforms
T2 - International Conference on Smart Health, ICSH 2018
AU - Li, Chunxiao
AU - Gu, Bin
AU - Guo, Chenhui
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2018.
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - In recent years, people have witnessed the growing popularity of mobile health applications, which represents a promising solution for health management. Developers of such mobile apps routinely deploy incentive programs, in which users receive financial rewards after achieving certain performance goals. In this paper, we seek to identify the effects of financial incentives, and to take a close examination at strategic behavior of users who self-report their performance. Drawing on the behavioral economics literature on incentives, we leverage a field quasi-experiment on a mobile health application to identify the effect of financial incentives. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we find that financial rewards lead to improvements in weight loss performance during the intervention period compared to the control group without financial rewards, but the performance difference does not persist after the removal of financial rewards at the end of the intervention period (i.e. no post-intervention effect). More importantly, we find evidence of strategic behavior: participants tend to over-report their initial body weight so as to increase the likelihood to reach performance goals and obtain the rewards. Further, we find that certain social networking features could possibly mitigate strategic behavior. In particular, participants who have more social connections and social activities are less likely to behave strategically. Our study contributes to the IS literature on leveraging economic incentives for online behavioral interventions and provides insights for the implementation of such incentives on digital health management platforms.
AB - In recent years, people have witnessed the growing popularity of mobile health applications, which represents a promising solution for health management. Developers of such mobile apps routinely deploy incentive programs, in which users receive financial rewards after achieving certain performance goals. In this paper, we seek to identify the effects of financial incentives, and to take a close examination at strategic behavior of users who self-report their performance. Drawing on the behavioral economics literature on incentives, we leverage a field quasi-experiment on a mobile health application to identify the effect of financial incentives. Using a difference-in-differences framework, we find that financial rewards lead to improvements in weight loss performance during the intervention period compared to the control group without financial rewards, but the performance difference does not persist after the removal of financial rewards at the end of the intervention period (i.e. no post-intervention effect). More importantly, we find evidence of strategic behavior: participants tend to over-report their initial body weight so as to increase the likelihood to reach performance goals and obtain the rewards. Further, we find that certain social networking features could possibly mitigate strategic behavior. In particular, participants who have more social connections and social activities are less likely to behave strategically. Our study contributes to the IS literature on leveraging economic incentives for online behavioral interventions and provides insights for the implementation of such incentives on digital health management platforms.
KW - Difference-in-differences
KW - Digital behavioral interventions
KW - Financial incentives
KW - Mobile health apps
KW - Quasi-experiment
KW - Strategic behavior
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85056450576&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85056450576&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-03649-2_13
DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-03649-2_13
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85056450576
SN - 9783030036485
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 130
EP - 141
BT - Smart Health - International Conference, ICSH 2018, Proceedings
A2 - Chen, Hsinchun
A2 - Zeng, Daniel
A2 - Fang, Qing
A2 - Wu, Jiang
PB - Springer Verlag
Y2 - 1 July 2018 through 3 July 2018
ER -