We present a radical solution to the two foremost challenges facing “blockchain”-based cryptocurrencies: (1) “mining pool” oligopolies and (2) incompressibility of delays affecting validation. Both problems stem from the Blockchain mechanism itself, which drives participants into a winner-takes-all global contest that amounts to a low-odds high-variance rewards lottery. Our proposal strips out ...

Why do the poor make shortsighted choices in decisions that involve delayed payoffs? Foregoing immediate rewards for larger, later rewards requires that decision makers (i) believe future payoffs will occur and (ii) are not forced to take the immediate reward out of financial need. Low-income individuals may be both less likely to believe future payoffs will occur and less able to forego immedi...

Reducing tobacco use among adolescents in China represents a significant challenge for global tobacco control. Existing behavioral theories developed in the West - such as the Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) - may be useful tools to help tackle this challenge. We examined the relationships between PMT factors and self-reported cigarette smoking behavior and intention among a random sample of...

BACKGROUND Processing of food and drug rewards involves specific neurocircuitry, and emerging evidence implicates subcortical abnormalities, particularly the nucleus accumbens and hippocampus. We specifically hypothesized that these 2 established regions in addiction neurocircuitry are associated with distinctive in vivo structural abnormalities in obesity and alcohol dependence. METHODS To s...

Using original survey data, this paper examines whether monetary rewards and honor rewards encourage or discourage blood donation. On the use of monetary rewards, we find that i) the overall sample’s response to monetary rewards is positive, and ii) people who volunteer more frequently, people who donated blood regularlt and people who donate blood to help others respond less positively to mone...

This research seeks to quantify the impact of the choice of reward function on behavioral diversity in learning robot teams The methodology developed for this work has been applied to multirobot forag ing soccer and cooperative movement This paper focuses speci cally on results in multirobot forag ing In these experiments three types of reward are used with Q learning to train a multirobot team...

BACKGROUND The decision to commit suicide may be impulsive, but lethal suicidal acts often involve planning and forethought. People who attempt suicide make disadvantageous decisions in other contexts, but nothing is known about the way they decide about the future. Can the willingness to postpone future gratification differentiate between individuals prone to serious, premeditated and less ser...

Two studies examined whether the detrimental effects of attention to rewards on delay of gratification in waiting situations holds-or reverses-in working situations. In Study 1, preschoolers waited or worked for desired delayed rewards. Delay times increased when children worked in the presence of rewards but, as predicted, this increase was due to the distraction provided by the work itself. n...

Impulsivity is a stable personality trait associated with myopic choice behavior that favors immediate rewards over larger, delayed rewards and is often characterized as maladaptive inside and outside of the laboratory. An alternative view suggests that the consequences of trait impulsivity depend on the nature of the task environment. On this view, the optimal level of impulsivity varies acros...