How does habit form? Guidelines for tracking real-world habit formation

Habit formation

Habits, both good ones and bad ones, are pervasive in animal behavior. Important frameworks have been developed to understand habits through psychological and neurobiological studies. This work has given us a rich understanding of brain networks that promote habits, and has also helped us to understand what constitutes a habitual behavior as opposed to a behavior that is more flexible and prosp...

Habit Formation in Twitter

The concept of habit has been receiving a lot of attention among Information Systems (IS) researchers. In recent years, we have witnessed a considerable progress in the conceptualization and operationalization of IS habit. However, little theoretical and empirical attention has been given to the formation of IS habit. To fill this gap, this paper builds and tests a theoretical model investigati...

Altruistic Behavior and Habit Formation

Altruistic Behavior and Habit Formation This paper examines whether altruistic behavior is habit forming. We take advantage of a data set that includes a rich set of information concerning individuals’ donations of cash and time as adults as well as information about whether they were involved with charitable activities when they were young. The basic premise is that if altruistic behavior when...

Consumption Models with Habit Formation

Estimating Habit Formation in Voting∗

We estimate habit formation in voting—the effect of past on current turnout—by exploiting transitory voting cost shocks. Using county-level data on U.S. presidential elections from 1952-2012, we find that precipitation on current and past election days reduces voter turnout. Our estimates imply that a 1-point decrease in past turnout lowers current turnout by 0.7-0.9 points. Further analyses su...