Paying to go to the gym and other problems of self control

As we briefly discussed in class today, consumers tend to be farsighted planners but myopic doers, a terminology introduced by one of the leading figures in behavioural economics, Richard Thaler.

Della Vigna and Malmendier find  some evidence for this when they look at patterns of commitment and attendance of 3 large gyms in the US. Gym goers are often overly optimistic about the probability of going to the gym, subscribing to a monthly membership contract that is more costly in the end than any drop in or 10-class pass contract. You can find a summary of these findings here.

Here  and here  are even more extreme and sophisticated versions of commitment devices to address this problem.

Problems of self control go of course, well beyond gym memberships. A recent paper  describes a randomized experiment that investigates whether problems of self control apply to how people choose to be compensated for work. A shorter summary of the paper can be found here.