New technologies aimed at nudging large numbers of individuals towards healthier behavior (e.g., fitness trackers, wearables, A.I.-based health coaching) increasingly focus on allowing users to track their own health goal-directed behavior on an ongoing basis, in the hope to boost their...

Under the context of digital health, I explore the potential opportunity costs associated with giving customers a sense of success. Using large-scale data from a popular mobile fitness application, I show that many users who enjoy certain past successes need not necessarily upgrade to the...

We investigate the role of small victories, in the form of short-term goal achievements, on long-term health outcomes. Using novel large-scale data from a popular mobile calorie and weight management application, we track the daily health outcomes across a large number of users. The application...

We investigate the role of heterogeneous peer effects in encouraging healthy lifestyles. Our analysis revolves around one of the largest and most extensive databases about weight loss that track individual participants' meeting attendance and progress in a large national weight loss program. The...