A Behavioral Economics Approach to Health Promotion in Organizations: Design Principles and Evaluation

Due to the lack of research at the intersection of IT and behavioral health economics we investigate results-based incentives for health promotion in organizations by questioning (1) whether and why employees accept them, (2) which functional affordances of IT enable their implementation and, finally, (3) whether they have positive effects on the health promotion behavior of employees. The current presentation addresses the first two research questions and describes a first build-and-evaluate cycle according to design-science research methodology. For that purpose, the delay of gratification framework is used as justificatory knowledge to inform the design of results-based incentive models for health promotion in organizations (RIMHPO) and their enabling IT artifacts. In a second step, an empirical study was conducted to assess one particular RIMHPO-based program and to gather further feedback on the design principles. The expected results of the current work are finally discussed with regard to policy implications.