Health club attendance, expectations and self-control

Abstract

We use a unique dataset on health club attendance from Montreal (Canada) to look at the relationship between actual and expected attendance, and how these relate to a reported measure of self-control problems at the time of contract signing. Consistently with previous studies, a vast majority of contract choices are unlikely to be compatible with time-consistent behavior. For 56.83% of members, the actual cost per visit with the contract is higher than the pay-per-visit option. Conditional on paying more with a subscription, we calculate that the median cost of choosing a long-term contract over the per-visit option is $346.45, excluding any commitment value. However, we compute that nearly all members would have paid less with the long-term contract if they had exercised as often as they initially planned. We study how actual attendance following contract choice is related to baseline reports of self-control. We find that reports of self-control problems are associated with low future attendance and with faster decrease in attendance, in particular after New Year, but not with expected attendance. Our results are consistent with a model of health club participation where agents underestimate the severity of their self-control problems. We find that individuals with a large gap between expected and realized attendance have a lower probability of contract renewal which has implications for mechanism design to retain customers.