E conomists often emphasize that “incentives matter.” The basic “law of behavior” is that higher incentives will lead to more effort and higher performance. Employers, for example, often use extrinsic incentives to motivate their employees. In recent years, the use of incentives in behavioral interventions has become more popular. Should students be provided with fi nancial incentives for incre...

BACKGROUND Injection drug users (IDUs) are at high-risk for hepatitis B virus (HBV) and HIV. Due to concerns about non-adherence to multi-dose vaccine regimens however, IDUs are severely under-immunized against HBV and have been excluded from phase III trials of multi-dose candidate HIV vaccines in the United States. METHODS Through a randomized controlled trial, we compared the effectiveness...

There is no evidence comparing head-to-head the effects of monetary incentives to act and to abstain from acting on behaviour. We present an experiment, conducted between June and September 2012, that directly compares the effects of those two different monetary incentive schemes on eating behaviour: we evaluate incentives to eat against incentives not to eat. A large number of participants (n ...

This paper reports the results of a natural field experiment where workers from a paid crowdsourcing environment selfselect into tasks and are presumed to have limited attention. In our experiment, workers labeled any of six pictures from a 2 x 3 grid of thumbnail images. In the absence of any incentives, workers exhibit a strong default bias and tend to select images from the top-left (“focal”...

MONETARY INCENTIVES ARE INCREASINGLY used to help motivate survey participation. Research Ethics Committees have begun to ask whether, and under what conditions, the use of monetary incentives to induce participation might be coercive. The article reports research from an online vignette-based study bearing on this question, concluding that at present the evidence suggests that larger incentive...

Monetary and non-monetary incentives for rural teacher recruitment are a prominent feature of developing-country education systems. Despite the widespread use of incentives, there is little theoretical or empirical evidence on their e!ectiveness. This paper interprets incentive policies within the framework of the economic theory of compensating di!erentials. The discussion clari"es the implici...

This paper experimentally examines image motivation—the desire to be liked and well-regarded by others—as a driver in prosocial behavior (doing good), and asks whether extrinsic monetary incentives (doing well) have a detrimental effect on prosocial behavior due to crowding out of image motivation. By definition, image depends on one’s behavior being visible to other people. Using this unique p...

The authors evaluated mechanistic and metacognitive accounts of age differences in strategy transitions during skill acquisition. Old and young participants were trained on a task involving a shift from performing a novel arithmetic algorithm to responding via associative recognition of equation-solution pairings. The strategy shift was manipulated by task instructions that either (a) equally f...

BACKGROUND Low survey response rates in general practice are common and lead to loss of power, selection bias, unexpected budgetary constraints and time delays in research projects. METHODS OBJECTIVE To assess the effectiveness of recruitment strategies aimed at increasing survey response rates among GPs. DESIGN Systematic review. SEARCH METHODS MEDLINE (OVIDSP, 1948-2012), EMBASE (OVI...