Carrots, sticks and fog during insurgencies

Carrots, sticks and fog during insurgencies

We formulate a rational choice model of popular behavior during an insurgency. An individual in the population either supports the insurgents or the government depending upon his attitude and the actions taken by each side. We focus on the effect of insurgency actions: benefits, impositions, and coercion. While benefits and impositions are applied uniformly throughout, the insurgents intend to ...

Sticks and Carrots in Procurement∗

We study differently framed incentives in dynamic laboratory buyerseller relationships with multi-tasking and endogenous matching. The experimental design tries to mitigate the role of social preferences and intrinsic motivation. Absent explicit incentives, effort is low in both tasks. Their introduction boosts efficiency substantially increasing effort in the contractible task, mildly crowding...

Editorials Carrots, sticks and tuberculosis

The spectrum of nitrofurantoin lung injury continues to widen. The case histories are presented of two patients who developed lung disease associated with the use of nitrofurantoin with histological features of bronchiolitis obliterans organising pneumonia (BOOP), a rare but recognised form of drug induced injury. The two middle aged women presented with respiratory symptoms after prolonged tre...

Carrots and sticks for quality health care.

Carrots and Sticks: Prizes and Punishments in Contests

We study optimal contest design in situations where the designer can reward high performance agents with positive prizes and punish low performance agents with negative prizes. We link the optimal prize structure to the curvature of distribution of abilities in the population. In particular, we identify conditions under which, even if punishment is costly, punishing the bottom is more effective...