Customer reward systems have rapidly shifted from plastic cards schemes to mobile application-based initiatives, yet our understanding of the economic value of mobile reward systems has not kept pace with this development. Using an individual-level transaction and reward redemption dataset from a large multi-brand, offline food-andbeverage merchandiser, we examine the effects of reward app adop...

Recent work has defined an optimal reward problem (ORP) in which an agent designer, with an objective reward function that evaluates an agent’s behavior, has a choice of what reward function to build into a learning or planning agent to guide its behavior. Existing results on ORP show weak mitigation of limited computational resources, i.e., the existence of reward functions so that agents when...

Sensitivity to time, including the time of reward, guides the behaviour of all organisms. Recent research suggests that all major reward structures of the brain process the time of reward occurrence, including midbrain dopamine neurons, striatum, frontal cortex and amygdala. Neuronal reward responses in dopamine neurons, striatum and frontal cortex show temporal discounting of reward value. The...

Reward processing has been implicated in developmental disorders. However, the classic task to probe reward anticipation, the monetary incentive delay task, has an abstract coding of reward and no storyline and may therefore be less appropriate for use with developmental populations. We modified the task to create a version appropriate for use with children. We investigated whether this child-f...

Approach to reward is a fundamental adaptive behavior, disruption of which is a core symptom of addiction and depression. Nucleus accumbens (NAc) dopamine is required for reward-predictive cues to activate vigorous reward seeking, but the underlying neural mechanism is unknown. Reward-predictive cues elicit both dopamine release in the NAc and excitations and inhibitions in NAc neurons. However...

Interindividual differences in the effects of reward on performance are prevalent and poorly understood, with some individuals being more dependent than others on the rewarding outcomes of their actions. The origin of this variability in reward dependence is unknown. Here, we tested the relationship between reward dependence and brain structure in healthy humans. Subjects trained on a visuomoto...

It is important for animals to estimate the value of rewards as accurately as possible. Because the number of potential reward values is very large, it is necessary that the brain's limited resources be allocated so as to discriminate better among more likely reward outcomes at the expense of less likely outcomes. We found that midbrain dopamine neurons rapidly adapted to the information provid...

This paper looks at reward within computer games and establishes a visual framework for displaying the reward mechanics used in games in the form of “Three Corners of Reward”. It establishes the link between personal reward, material reward and competitive reward through three drivers: intrinsic, extrinsic and social play. The work shows that this framework has two purposes. One is of a framewo...