We experimentally investigate a repeated “inspection game” where, in the stage game, an employee can either work or shirk and an employer simultaneously chooses to inspect or not inspect. The unique equilibrium of the stage game is in mixed strategies with positive probabilities of shirking/inspecting while combined payoffs are maximized when the employee works and the employer does not inspect...

We propose that separating rewards into categories can increase motivation, even when those categories are meaningless. Across six experiments, people were more motivated to obtain one reward from one category and another reward from another category than they were to obtain two rewards from a pool that included all items from either reward category. As a result, they worked longer when potenti...

Decision making often involves choosing between small, short-term rewards and large, long-term rewards. All animals, humans included, discount future rewards--the present value of delayed rewards is viewed as less than the value of immediate rewards. Despite its ubiquity, there exists considerable but unexplained variation between species in their capacity to wait for rewards--that is, to exert...

One of the most debilitating aspects of schizophrenia is an apparent interest in or ability to exert effort for rewards. Such "negative symptoms" may prevent individuals from obtaining potentially beneficial outcomes in educational, occupational, or social domains. In animal models, dopamine abnormalities decrease willingness to work for rewards, implicating dopamine (DA) function as a candidat...

Commons dilemmas are interaction situations where a common good is provided or exploited by a group of individuals so that optimal collective outcomes clash with private interests. Although in these situations, social norms and institutions exist that might help individuals to cooperate, little is known about the interaction effects between positive and negative incentives and exit options by i...

Deficits in episodic memory are associated with deficits in the ability to imagine future experiences (i.e., mental time travel). We show that K.C., a person with episodic amnesia and an inability to imagine future experiences, nonetheless systematically discounts the value of future rewards, and his discounting is within the range of controls in terms of both rate and consistency. Because K.C....

Rewards are identified as an instrument that promotes cooperation in social dilemmas. All previous experimental studies on this topic use a design that allows for reciprocity with respect to play in the social dilemma, but not for reciprocity to rewards received (for example because interaction is one-shot, or because subject identity labels are randomly reassigned between periods). We introduc...

Primates depend for their survival on their ability to understand their social environment, and their behavior is often shaped by social circumstances. We report that the orbitofrontal cortex, a brain region involved in motivation and reward, is tuned to social information. Macaque monkeys worked to collect rewards for themselves and two monkey partners. Behaviorally, monkeys discriminated betw...

One popular approach to active perception is using POMDPs to maximize rewards received for sensing actions towards task accomplishment and/or continually refining the agent’s knowledge. Multiple types of reward functions have been proposed to achieve these goals: (1) state-based rewards which minimize sensing costs and maximize task rewards, (2) belief-based rewards which maximize belief state ...

A ’soft’ control of the network activity through varying reward in a proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrency is reported. Rewards are the necessity to incent the contributors’ activities (i.e., mining) in order to maintain the PoW network. Contrary to constant rewarding in a certain period implemented in most of cryptocurrency, such as bitcoin, we propose a network-dependent rewarding model system, ...