Keep an Eye on Me: The Role of Online Communities as a Commitment for Healthier Behaviors

Individuals join online healthcare communities (OHCs) to engage with an audience that observes their behaviors with the aim of improving self-control. While this engagement requires a significant investment of time, energy, and attention, it represents a voluntary act we describe as "audience pre-commitment”, where participants willingly accept these costs to gain accountability. In this paper, utilizing data from a large OHC platform, we empirically explore which individuals engage with community features as a form of audience pre-commitment and assess the impact of such an engagement on health behaviors. Our analysis provides evidence that individuals use the community as a means of pre-commitment and such engagement positively and significantly impacts health behaviors. The effectiveness of pre-commitment is further enhanced by a strong network, a private community, and a larger community. We further investigate and discuss insights into the potential mechanisms through which communities help alleviate self-regulation problems.