Amount Of Rewards Research Articles

Pollinators and seed predators generate conflicting selection onDalechampiablossoms

Plant–pollinator relationships are often mediated by floral traits that advertise the presence or amount of rewards. However, herbivores may also use these traits to find their hosts. InDalechampia scandens, we tested whether floral advertisements that attract pollinators were also used by seed predators, and whether this generated conflicting selection pressures. We studied the influence of natural variation in the size of showy bracts, amount of reward, and two shape traits on pollinator visitation, pollen arrival on stigmas, seed production and seed predation. We then built a multivariate fitness function for these traits to estimate selection generated by pollinators and seed predators. Blossoms with larger bracts were visited by bees more frequently and received more pollen on their stigmas. Seed predators laid more eggs on blossoms with larger bracts and also on blossoms later producing more seeds. Consequently, selection for larger bract size exerted by pollinators was counteracted by the selection exerted by seed predators. As a result, net selection on bract size tended to be stabilizing. Additionally, we found selection on traits that increased the rate of self‐pollination (assuming uniform seed quality). These results illustrate the importance of both mutualists and antagonists in floral evolution, as well as the value of taking an integrative approach to assessing selection on floral traits.

Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) transfer tokens repeatedly with a partner to accumulate rewards in a self-control task

There has been extensive research investigating self-control in humans and nonhuman animals, yet we know surprisingly little about how one's social environment influences self-control. The present study examined the self-control of chimpanzees in a task that required active engagement with conspecifics. The task consisted of transferring a token back and forth with a partner animal in order to accumulate food rewards, one item per token transfer. Self-control was required because at any point in the trial, either chimpanzee could obtain their accumulated rewards, but doing so discontinued the food accumulation and ended the trial for both individuals. Chimpanzees readily engaged the task and accumulated the majority of available rewards before ending each trial, and they did so across a number of conditions that varied the identity of the partner, the presence/absence of the experimenter, and the means by which they could obtain rewards. A second experiment examined chimpanzees' self-control when given the choice between immediately available food items and a potentially larger amount of rewards that could be obtained by engaging the token transfer task with a partner. Chimpanzees were flexible in their decision-making in this test, typically choosing the option representing the largest amount of food, even if it involved delayed accumulation of the rewards via the token transfer task. These results demonstrate that chimpanzees can exhibit self-control in situations involving social interactions, and they encourage further research into this important aspect of the self-control scenario.

The wellness prescription

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore how loyalty marketers are inspiring and incentivizing consumers to stay healthy in the wake of sky‐rocketing health care costs and a new US health care bill.Design/methodology/approachThe paper's approach is to tap into well‐known wellness program providers, like Virgin HealthMiles, CIGNA and CVS Caremark, to provide insight into how marketers are looking to utilize the “carrot” (positive incentives) to inspire consumers to stay healthy rather than the stick (punishment).FindingsThe new health care legislation signed by President Obama in March, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, has put a firm stamp of approval and support behind the use of incentives and rewards by health and wellness programs. In effect, loyalty marketing tactics are becoming a more important tool than ever in health care reform. Most noticeably, beginning in 2014, employers will be able to offer their workers an increased amount of rewards, worth up to 30‐50 percent of their health coverage costs, for participating in a wellness program and meeting health benchmarks. In addition, health insurance companies will be required to implement health and wellness promotion activities.Practical implicationsDeploying loyalty tactics by the “carrot” contingent has put into practice the growing disciplines of “behavioral economics” and “choice architecture” that have become hot topics over the past couple of years within various industries, including government and finance. Best‐selling books such as Freakonomics and Predictably Irrational have focused on behavioral economics, defined as the use of social, cognitive and emotional factors in understanding and influencing the decisions of individuals. Digital tools are being used to create a handy consumer‐direct link and motivational boost to the consumer‐pharmacy relationship. WellQ – a wellness behavior‐change program developed by LoyaltyOne in partnership with the American Pharmacists Association – seeks to help patients shift their own behavior around their medications and health care, with the help of their retail pharmacy, where consumers sign up and provide a profile of medications and current health habits. Through WellQ, they then begin to receive mobile text‐based reminders as well as bite‐size educational and motivational content around self‐care delivered to their cell phones.Originality/valueThe paper provides exclusive interviews with representatives from some of the largest wellness program providers in the industry today. It also gives tangible tips and tools to utilize in real‐world marketing plans.

Selection on signal–reward correlation: limits and opportunities to the evolution of deceit in Turnera ulmifolia L.

Because pollinators are unable to directly assess the amount of rewards offered by flowers, they rely on the information provided by advertising floral traits. Thus, having a lower intra-individual correlation between signal and reward (signal accuracy) than other plants in the population provides the opportunity to reduce investment in rewards and cheat pollinators. However, pollinators' cognitive capacities can impose a limit to the evolution of this plant cheating strategy if they can punish those plants with low signal accuracy. In this study, we examined the opportunity for cheating in the perennial weed Turnera ulmifolia L. evaluating the selective value of signal accuracy, floral display and reward production in a natural population. We found that plant reproductive success was positively related to signal accuracy and floral display, but not to nectar production. The intensity of selection on floral display was more than three times higher than on signal accuracy. The pattern of selection indicated that pollinators can select for signal accuracy provided by plants and suggests that learning abilities of pollinators can limit the evolution of deceptive strategies in T. ulmifolia.

HOW DO THE REWARD APPROACHES AFFECT EMPLOYEES' INNOVATIVE BEHAVIORS? -- AN EMPIRICAL STUDY IN CHINESE ENTERPRISES.

The article reports on research which was conducted in an effort to examine the impact that extrinsic and intrinsic rewards approaches had on innovative behavior practices of employees who worked in Chinese business enterprises. Researchers issued surveys to employees who worked in several Chinese cities. They found that tangible extrinsic rewards are necessary conditions to encourage employee's innovative behaviors; however, the over amount of extrinsic rewards could depress this behavior by eroding their self-motivation. They also concluded that series of intrinsic reward approaches have a more stable effect on promoting innovative behavior and that extrinsic and intrinsic rewards have an interference interaction effect on innovative behavior.

How the brain translates money into force: a neuroimaging study of subliminal motivation.

Unconscious motivation in humans is often inferred but rarely demonstrated empirically. We imaged motivational processes, implemented in a paradigm that varied the amount and reportability of monetary rewards for which subjects exerted physical effort. We show that, even when subjects cannot report how much money is at stake, they nevertheless deploy more force for higher amounts. Such a motivational effect is underpinned by engagement of a specific basal forebrain region. Our findings thus reveal this region as a key node in brain circuitry that enables expected rewards to energize behavior, without the need for the subjects;awareness.

Coping Resources

The impact that parenting responsibilities have on the psychological well-being of African American grandparents raising grandchildren is an increasing concern in American society. Contemporary research studies indicate that African American grandparents who encounter a variety of challenges in raising their grandchildren are able to cope successfully with these situations if they derive a sufficient amount of psychological rewards from raising grandchildren (Giarrusso, Silverstein, & DuFeng, 2000). These rewards include increased gratification, feelings of usefulness, and increasing pride in their own abilities to meet new challenges (Fuller-Thomason & Minkler, 2000). This article will investigate how the coping resource factors of intergenerational solidarity, informal social support and spirituality enhance the psychological well-being of African American grandparents who are raising their grandchildren. doi:10.1300/J045v22n03_09.

An analysis of turnover among retail buyers

Controlling turnover is important for all organizations. However, it is especially important among retail buyers where turnover can be as high as 30%. Buyers have a significant role in retailing firms since they are responsible for determining which products to purchase, deciding the accurate quantity needed, and negotiating contracts. Lowering the turnover rate among these employees can contribute to the firm's profitability. This study contributes to current knowledge by investigating the influence of organizational justice in the turnover process. The results suggest that turnover can be lowered among retail buyers when they perceive fair treatment in the amount of rewards allocated and the fairness in the method in which rewards are allocated. Suggestions for implementing policies to achieve higher organizational justice and lower turnover for retailers are discussed.

A reinforcement learning approach to fail-safe design for multiple space robots—cooperation mechanism without communication and negotiation schemes

This paper explores a fail-safe design for multiple space robots, which enables robots to complete given tasks even when they can no longer be controlled due to a communication accident or negotiation problem. As the first step towards this goal, we propose new reinforcement learning methods that help robots avoid deadlock situations in addition to improving the degree of task completion without communications via ground stations or negotiations with other robots. Through intensive simulations on a truss construction task, we found that our reinforcement learning methods have great potential to contribute towards fail-safe design for multiple space robots in the above case. Furthermore, the simulations revealed the following detailed implications: (i) the first several planned behaviors must not be reinforced with negative rewards even in deadlock situations in order to derive cooperation among multiple robots, (ii) a certain amount of positive rewards added into negative rewards in deadlock situations contributes to reducing the computational cost of finding behavior plans for task completion, and (iii) an appropriate balance between positive and negative rewards in deadlock situations is indispensable for finding good behavior plans at a small computational cost.

Influence of Intermittent Rewards in Learning to Handle Flowers in Bumblebees (Hymenoptera: Apidae: Bombus impatiens)

Bumblebees, Bombus impatiens Cresson 1863 had to learn to associate colour signals with particular motor patterns needed to extract sucrose solution from artificial flowers. The influence of reward variance on learning such motor skills was tested. Learning speed does not depend on the amount or variance of rewards when bumblebees learned only one novel task. If, however, bumblebees have to switch between 2 flower types while familiarising themselves with their morphology, increased reward variance does slow down the rate of learning, while reward amount has no influence over the range tested.

Pay and Personality

Compensation plan design focuses on management’s pay philosophy, the organization’s expectations with regard to business results or effective work behaviors and the kind and amount of rewards to be offered. The premise is that rewards can shape and drive behavior. Research would suggest that this is true. The effectiveness of compensation plans, however, can be increased or diminished by a factor that is rarely accounted for in the design and communication of compensation plans—the personality profiles of the employees themselves. This article marries compensation plan attributes to a commonly used personality profiling device called the DISC to demonstrate the considerations that would come into play for compensation plans designed for four different personality types. In addition to compensation plan design considerations, personality also plays a role in how compensation plans are communicated to employees, a critical step in implementing compensation plans.

ECOLOGICAL COSTS OF PLANT RESISTANCE TO HERBIVORES IN THE CURRENCY OF POLLINATION.

In this paper, we examine how ecological costs of resistance might be manifested through plant relationships with pollinators. If defensive compounds are incorporated into floral structures or if they are sufficiently costly that fewer rewards are offered to pollinators, pollinators may discriminate against more defended plants. Here we consider whether directional selection for increased resistance to herbivores could be constrained by opposing selection through pollinator discrimination against more defended plants. We used artificial selection to create two populations of Brassica rapa plants that had high and low myrosinase concentrations and, consequently, high and low resistance to flea beetle herbivores. We measured changes in floral characters of plants in both damaged and undamaged states from these populations with different resistances to flea beetle attack. We also measured pollinator visitation to plants, including numbers of pollinators and measures of visit quality (numbers of flowers visited and time spent per flower). Damage from herbivores resulted in reduced petal size, as did selection for high resistance to herbivores later in the plant lifetime. In addition, floral display (number of open flowers) was also altered by an interaction between these two effects. Changes in floral traits translated into overall greater use of low-resistance, undamaged plants based on total amount of time pollinators spent foraging on plants. Total numbers of pollinators attracted to plants did not differ among treatments; however, pollinators spent significantly more time per flower on plants from the low-resistance population and tended to visit more flowers on these plants as well. Previous work by other investigators on the same pollinator taxa has shown that longer visit times are associated with greater male and female plant fitness. Because initial numbers of pollinators did not differ between selection regimes, palatability and/or amount of rewards offered by high- and low-resistance populations are likely to be responsible for these patterns. During periods of pollinator limitation, less defended plants may have a selective advantage and pollinator preferences may mediate directional selection imposed by herbivores. In addition, if pollinator preferences limit seed set in highly defended plants, then lower seed set previously attributed to allocation costs of defense may also reflect greater pollinator limitation in these plants relative to less defended plants.

Interruptions, Tradeoffs, and Temporal Discounting

Variance in amount of rewards has been the focus of many studies and models of risk sensitivity. However, the timing of rewards has received much less attention. Animals tend to prefer immediate rewards, even when this preference reduces the long term rate of gain. This implies future rewards are devalued, a phenomenon known as time discounting. The value of a reward can be represented by a function that is decreasing and concave-up with increasing delays until receipt of reward. When a forager is given the choice between an immediate small reward and a delayed larger reward, preference reverses from the smaller to the larger as the delays to both rewards increase. There are several descriptive time discounting models. The exponential and the hyperbolic models both result in the concave-up value function and hence risk sensitivity with respect to timing. However, in the traditional models, only the hyperbolic model predicts preference reversal. We present a model of discounting as a continuous time Markov process. In this model, the discounting rate is determined by the perceived likelihood that the forager will be interrupted from the foraging process. In this continuous interruption rate model, we find both the concave-up value function and preference reversal. In an expanded model that accounts for the variable inter-trial intervals often used in tests of preference, we find that the two portions of the inter-trial interval are weighted differently. Finally, we generate a generalized fitness model to examine the influence of the fitness consequences of a given interruption on foraging choices and find that the type of trade-off involved determines the fitness outcome.