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 ...

BACKGROUND Sending a monetary incentive with postal questionnaires has been found to improve the proportion of responders, in research in non-healthcare settings. However, there is little research on use of incentives to improve follow-up rates in clinical trials, and existing studies are inconclusive. We conducted a randomised trial among participants in the Managing Injuries of the Neck Trial...

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 aim of this paper to explain gift-giving by means of social approval. In a simple framework we are able to account for a number of stylized facts. These are that gift-giving is often reciprocal, that gifts tend to be inadequate, and that gift-giving is sometimes reduced after a monetary compensation is o¤ered. The implication for the interaction between gift-giving and the market institutio...

The dopaminergic system provides the basis for the interaction between motivation and cognition. It is triggered by the possibility of obtaining rewards to initiate the neurobehavioral adaptations necessary to achieve them by directing the information from motivational circuits to cognitive and action circuits. In drug addiction, the altered dopamine (DA) modulation of the meso-cortico-limbic r...

Evaluating and selecting alternatives investment projects needs considering all relevant and important aspects. In traditional methods, the focus is just on tangible monetary criteria. Also in the traditional methods, either all the information’s about factors must be known precisely or sufficient objective data must be available for applying probability theory. In this paper, a combinative app...

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...

This thesis consists of three theoretical essays that examine the role of organizational architecture in facilitating organizational adaptation to a changing environment. Chapter 1 develops a model of coordinated adaptation where an organization needs to respond to incoming information about its environment while at the same time retaining coordination between its activities. It analyzes how th...