Abstract:
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We investigate the role of small victories, in the form of short-term goal achievements, on long-term health outcomes. Using novel large-scale data from a popular mobile calorie and weight management application, we track the daily health outcomes across a large number of users. The application sets a salient daily budget for calories, and by comparing cases in which the user is slightly under or over-budget, we first document empirical patterns between small victories and various long-term weight-loss outcomes. Motivated by these patterns, we estimate a dynamic structural model of calorie consumption with reference-dependent utility to evaluate various hypothetical goal design schemes. Counterfactual analysis of the estimated model reveal that adaptive goals are better at balancing long-run utility and disciplined calorie consumption.
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