This paper is a study designed to understand how intrinsic rewards, as compared with extrinsic rewards, are perceived as sources of motivation by staff of NFP organisations. Data was gathered through a survey featuring a number of statements about intrinsic and extrinsic rewards. The small-sample t-test was used to determine the significance of responses, and hence test the hypothesis that empl...

WOULD YOU SPEND MONEY TODAY TO MAKE THE WORLD A SUBSTANTIALLY BETTER PLACE FOR YOUR children and grandchildren? Most of us would. But what if the benefi t would accrue only to your great-great-great-great-grandchildren, not born until the 22nd century? That’s an awfully distant time horizon for most people. Many would probably spend today’s resources on more immediate concerns. Economists model...

This paper presents a novel form of policy gradient for model-free reinforcement learning (RL) with improved exploration properties. Current policy-based methods use entropy regularization to encourage undirected exploration of the reward landscape, which is ineffective in high dimensional spaces with sparse rewards. We propose a more directed exploration strategy that promotes exploration of u...

Vivian Siegel is at the Department of Medicine, Vanderbilt University School of Medicine, Nashville, Tennessee, USA (e-mail: [email protected]) By establishing the Resource Article section and stronger policies for materialssharing and citation, we hope to encourage and properly reward the development and sharing of resources, thereby accelerating research using model organisms to advanc...

Using event-related fMRI, Wittmann and colleagues report in this issue of Neuron that reward value enhances cue memory and that this process is associated with midbrain modulation of hippocampal consolidation. We propose that their findings introduce a novel mechanism by which positive arousal induced by reward anticipation may promote memory.

This paper analyzes the impact of rewards on tax compliance as an additional instrument to take into account. While social psychologists and neuroscientists have emphasized the importance of rewards, the tax compliance literature has strongly disregarded the possibilities of rewards. The use of field experiments presents an alternative “carrot” strategy for tax policy. Design mechanisms to cond...

Pathological gambling is an addictive disorder characterized by a persistent and compulsive desire to engage in gambling activities. This maladaptive behaviour has been suggested to result from a decreased sensitivity to experienced rewards, regardless of reward type. Alternatively, pathological gambling might reflect an imbalance in the sensitivity to monetary versus non-monetary incentives. T...

The present study compared the extent to which obese women with binge eating disorder (BED), obese women without BED, and controls discounted delayed and probabilistic money and directly consumable rewards: food, massage time, and preferred sedentary activity. Of special interest was whether the BED group differed from the other groups in terms of their discounting of all three types of directl...