Gym-Pact is a company founded by Yifan Zhang and Geoff Oberhofer that arranges for group membership rates at fitness clubs in Boston. Customers pay higher rates the more often that they skip workouts, thus encouraging them to keep in shape:
Link via Marginal Revolution | Photo: Essdras M. Suarez/Boston Globe
Gym-Pact offers what Zhang calls motivational fees — customers agree to pay more if they miss their scheduled workouts, literally buying into a financial penalty if they don’t stick to their fitness plans. The concept arose from Zhang’s behavioral economics class at Harvard, where professor Sendhil Mullainathan taught that people are more motivated by immediate consequences than by future possibilities.
Zhang and Oberhofer translated that principle to workout motivation. If missing a workout cost people money, they’d be more motivated to stick with it, they thought.
“If you have a toothache, you go to the dentist. If there’s a cavity, you know it needs to get filled in, but if it doesn’t hurt right now, you may not bother,’’ Mullainathan said. “In traditional gym memberships, not going is not very costly. In this one, you actually might feel the pain of not going immediately.’’
Link via Marginal Revolution | Photo: Essdras M. Suarez/Boston Globe
I think a fitness center could have have more motivation in assisting with their customer's fitness program if the customer would get refunded their fees because they were not at the gym as regular as their membership outlined.
Charging clients extra because clients don't attend just encourages the gym to be as lazy as the clients.