The basic idea that rewards, and in particular monetary rewards, may crowd out intrinsic motivation emanates from two quite different branches of literature in the social sciences. In his book The Gift Relationship, Richard Titmuss (1970) argued that paying for blood undermines cherished social values and would therefore reduce or totally eliminate people’s willingness to donate blood. However,...

Almost a third of US children ages 2-19 are deemed overweight or obese, and part of the problem is the habitual decision to consume high calorie, low nutrient foods. We propose that the school lunchroom provides a ‘teachable moment’ to engage children in making healthful choices. We conduct a field experiment with over 1,500 participants in grades K-8 and evaluate the impact of small non-moneta...

The Chinese tradition of supplementing large quantities of bronze cash with unminted gold and silver represents a rare exception to the western model of precious-metal coinage. This paper provides a detailed discussion of monetary development in ancient China followed by a brief survey of conditions in the Roman empire. The divergent development of the monetary systems of the Han and Roman empi...

This paper explores how changes in monetary staff incentive contracts affect the productivity of credit officers within microfinance institutions. The study uses a unique data set from five microfinance institutions that includes productivity data at the credit officer level for several months before and after a change in the incentive schemes. In each of the institutions, the monetary incentiv...

In this study, we contribute to a longstanding research agenda on the distinctions between public and private sectors by examining whether work effort differs settings, testing ways that sector-specific incentives can address such differences. We extend existing developing an advanced psychomotor vigilance task examines multi-dimensional performance (speed accuracy) in laboratory experiment. Dr...

This study examines the impact of individually oriented, purely altruistic, and a hybrid of competitive and cooperative monetary reward incentives on older adults' completion of cognitive exercises and cognitive function. We find that all three incentive structures approximately double the number of exercises completed during the six-week active experimental period relative to a no incentive co...

During the last two decades economists have made much progress in understanding incentives, contracts and organizations. Yet, they constrained their attention to a very narrow and empirically questionable view of human motivation. The purpose of this paper is to show that this narrow view of human motivation may severely limit understanding the determinants and e0ects of incentives. Economists ...

OBJECTIVE To quantify the effect of strategies to improve retention in randomised trials. DESIGN Systematic review and meta-analysis. DATA SOURCES Sources searched: MEDLINE, EMBASE, PsycINFO, DARE, CENTRAL, CINAHL, C2-SPECTR, ERIC, PreMEDLINE, Cochrane Methodology Register, Current Controlled Trials metaRegister, WHO trials platform, Society for Clinical Trials (SCT) conference proceedings ...