First carrot, then stick: how the adaptive hybridization of incentives promotes cooperation

First carrot, then stick: how the adaptive hybridization of incentives promotes cooperation

Social institutions often use rewards and penalties to promote cooperation. Providing incentives tends to be costly, so it is important to find effective and efficient policies for the combined use of rewards and penalties. Most studies of cooperation, however, have addressed rewarding and punishing in isolation and have focused on peer-to-peer sanctioning as opposed to institutional sanctionin...

How the adaptive hybridization of incentives promotes cooperation

Incentives and opportunism: from the carrot to the stick.

Cooperation in public good games is greatly promoted by positive and negative incentives. In this paper, we use evolutionary game dynamics to study the evolution of opportunism (the readiness to be swayed by incentives) and the evolution of trust (the propensity to cooperate in the absence of information on the co-players). If both positive and negative incentives are available, evolution leads...

Incentives in manufacturing: the carrot and the stick

To what degree do different incentives substitute for or complement each other in the manufacturing sector? Although this question has received considerable attention on the plant level, relatively little information is available on the subject for the U.S . manufacturing sector as a whole. This study presents the results of a small survey designed to elicit information so as to determine the c...

The Carrot or the Stick: Rewards, Punishments, and Cooperation

Many institutional arrangements suggest that punishments and rewards each play a separate role in providing incentives. In New York City’s recent negotiations with its teacher’s union, for instance, the city sought a contract that would strengthen school principals’ ability to assign teachers to be cafeteria monitors, in part because this allows them to punish underperforming teachers. The cont...