Difficulties achieving high response rates to patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) within clinical trials are well recognised. The NIHR HTA funded eTHoS trial, which compares Stapled Haemorrhoidopexy with Traditional Haemorrhoidectomy for the treatment of grade II-IV haemorrhoids, is no exception. Early response rates to postal PROMs on quality of life (distributed at 12 and 24 months post...

Financial or tangible incentives are a strategy for improving health behaviours. The mechanisms of action of incentives are complex and debated. Using a multidisciplinary integrated mixed methods study, with service-user collaboration throughout, we developed a typology of incentives and their meanings for initiating and sustaining smoking cessation in pregnancy and breastfeeding. The ultimate ...

OBJECTIVES Response rates to health-related surveys are declining. This study tested two strategies to improve the response rate to a health psychology survey mailed through English general practices: (1) sending a shortened questionnaire and (2) offering a monetary incentive to return a completed questionnaire. DESIGN Randomized controlled trial. METHODS Adults (n = 4,241) aged 45-59 years...

O rgan transplants began in 1954 with a kidney transplant performed at Brigham & Women’s hospital in Boston. But such procedures only began to take off with the development in the 1970s of immunosuppressive drugs that could prevent the rejection of transplanted organs. Since then, the number of kidney, liver, heart, and other organ transplants has grown rapidly, but not nearly as rapidly as the...

The costs of credit and accountability are good incentives for the Central Bank to increase independence. Independence of power and attention to economic policymaking in monetary decision-making can have a positive effect on the level of economic organization independence. The independent organization of the Central Bank has provided a plan for controlling inflation due to the importance of ind...

We compare the effects of two prominent organizational control mechanisms-social pressure and monetary incentive-on cognitive control. Cognitive control underlies the human ability to regulate thoughts and actions in the pursuit of behavioral goals. Previous studies show that monetary incentives can contribute to goal-oriented behavior by activating proactive control. There is, however, much le...

This paper studies a general equilibrium model that is consistent with recent empirical evidence showing that the U.S. price level and in‡ation are much more responsive to aggregate technology shocks than to monetary policy shocks. Speci…cally, we show that the fact that aggregate technology shocks are more volatile than monetary policy shocks induces …rms to pay more attention to the former th...

This paper studies optimal monetary policy and central bank transparency in an economy where firms set prices under informational frictions. The economy is subject to two types of shocks which determine the efficient level of output and the firms’ desired mark-up. To minimize the welfare-reducing output gap and price dispersion among the firms, the central bank controls the firms’ incentives an...

Reward seeking is ubiquitous and adaptive in humans. But excessive reward seeking behavior, such as chasing monetary rewards, may lead to diminished subjective well-being. This study examined whether individuals trained in mindfulness meditation show neural evidence of lower susceptibility to monetary rewards. Seventy-eight participants (34 meditators, 44 matched controls) completed the monetar...