The New Year started with such good intentions—resolutions to visit the gym, anyone?  Yet an informal survey of any given gym in the month of February paints an alternate reality.  By the time January ends, the packed parking lots, elliptical sessions, and high-trafficked lap pool lanes have dissipated.  But for all those determined to (forgive the delayed pun) buck the trend and ensure 2012 is not the year that exercise resolutions go unmet… there’s an app for that.

Gym Pact is a new app that merges behavioral economics with personal technology.  Behavior economics is a branch of economic theory based on a very important economic concept – incentives.  Incentives – economic, social and moral – determine how people behave.   They encourage good behavior (through discounts or bonuses) and discourage bad behavior (through fines). 

Gym Pact embraces both such incentives to help you stick to the healthy New Years resolution. Users register a profile and specify the number of gym visits committed to per-week and a suitable fine amount if this goal is unachieved.  The app acts as a monitoring device to record gym attendance and workout length (which must be at least thirty minutes in duration to constitute a complete visit). Gym Pact fines users who fail to meet attendance goals and uses the pool of collected fines to reward those who have satisfied goals.

Behavior economics places economic principles in a psychological context, applying scientific research on cognitive and emotional patterns to economic decision making.  One tenet of behavioral economics is the use of experiments to determine how individuals make decisions. The app makers used experimentation to determine that users best responded to a base fine of $5 for every missed gym visit.

Gym Pact serves as an intriguing example of economic incentives in action, taking the form of a product that could enhance and improve lives.  Stay tuned as we analyze the economic incentives used in other apps.  Now, back to the gym!