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 rainfall on current and past election days reduces voter turnout. Our estimates imply that a 1-point decrease in past turnout lowers current turnout by 0.6-1.0 points. Further analyses suggest...

BACKGROUND As dietary gatekeepers for young children, parents are often the proximal target of family-based dietary interventions. Habit theory offers a novel approach to modifying parental feeding, based on "context-dependent repetition" to promote automatic responding and to reduce decisional conflict. OBJECTIVE This exploratory trial evaluated an intervention promoting habit formation for ...

Dopamine promotes the execution of positively reinforced actions, but its role for the formation of behaviour when feedback is unavailable remains open. To study this issue, the performance of treated/untreated patients with Parkinson's disease and controls was analysed in an implicit learning task, hypothesising dopamine-dependent adherence to hidden task rules. Sixteen patients on/off levodop...

A counter-intuitive result from consumer theory is that consumers facing stable prices will benefit from a mean-preserving spread of those prices (Waugh 1944). This paper explores a new explanation for why the common intuition that price volatility is undesirable may be correct: the presence of habit formation in consumption. If prices are fluctuating, and preferences depend on past consumption...

A number of recent papers have explored monetary policy options, including inflation targeting and inflation forecast targeting (notably Svensson (1999a, 1999b, 2000)) and price level targeting (Wolman 2000, Batini and Yates 1999, Blinder 1999). Most papers explore “optimal” monetary policy in the context of a single model. However, a number of conclusions made in the literature depend strongly...

I formulate an econometric model of consumer learning and experimentation about new products in markets for packaged goods that nests alternative sources of dynamics, such as habit formation. The model is estimated on household level scanner data of laundry detergent purchases, and the results suggest that consumers have very similar expectations of their match value with new products before co...

Promotion of health habits help maintain and improve people’s health, reduce disease risks, and manage chronic illness. Regular healthy activities like walking, exercising, healthy eating, drinking water or taking medication on time require forming the new habits. Gamification techniques are promising in promoting healthy behaviors and delivering health promotion information. However, using ‘ga...

This research investigates whether the positive association between college students' current and high-school drinking is due to habit formation or whether it is solely due to the influence of unobserved individual characteristics that are correlated over time. The empirical investigation is based on individual level data from the 1997 and 1999 waves of the Harvard School of Public Health's Col...

To study non-durable import demand, we extend previous work done by Clarida (1994) and Ceglowski (1991) by considering a two-good version of the life cycle model in which we introduce time-nonseparability in the households' preferences. The model is estimated using quarterly data for US and France. Using the information contained in the observed stochastic and deterministic trends, we derive a ...

Previous studies suggest that feeding at dusk is probably dependent on the rat's immediate energy requirements, while feeding at dawn may have an 'anticipatory' function. However, little is known regarding the relative contribution of habit, energy deficits and circadian pacemakers in the expression of feeding behavior. The aim of the present study was to investigate the involvement of, and int...