Choice Of Incentives Research Articles

Cash or Non-Cash? Exploring Ideators’ Incentive Preferences in Crowdsourcing Contests

ABSTRACT Even though research has repeatedly shown that non-cash incentives can be effective, cash incentives are the de facto standard in crowdsourcing contests. In this multi-study research, we quantify ideators’ preferences for non-cash incentives and investigate how allowing ideators to self-select their preferred incentive—offering ideators a choice between cash and non-cash incentives—affects their creative performance. We further explore whether the market context of the organization hosting the contest—social (non-profit) or monetary (for-profit)—moderates incentive preferences and their effectiveness. We find that individuals exhibit heterogeneous incentive preferences and often prefer non-cash incentives, even in for-profit contexts. Offering ideators a choice of incentives can enhance creative performance. Market context moderates the effect of incentives, such that ideators who receive non-cash incentives in for-profit contexts tend to exert less effort. We show that heterogeneity of ideators’ preferences (and the ability to satisfy diverse preferences with suitably diverse incentive options) is a critical boundary condition to realizing benefits from offering ideators a choice of incentives. We provide managers with guidance to design effective incentives by improving incentive-preference fit for ideators.

Research on the driving path of carbon inclusive system to green behavior of the public: based on procedural grounded theory and multiple intermediary model.

As an emerging carbon emission reduction mechanism, the carbon inclusive system (CIS) develops an important effect in promoting public green behavior and has been piloted in some provinces and cities in China. Under this background, this paper deeply analyzes the public's attitude towards CIS and its influencing factors based on the grounded theory and 1120 questionnaires, and comprehensively discusses the action path of CIS on public green behavior by using multiple regression model, bootstrap method, and placebo test. The results show that CIS can promote the public to implement green behavior, and system operation, internal psychology, and government behavior are important factors that affect the incentive effect of CIS. Among them, incentive effect and green willingness play multiple intermediary and chain intermediary roles in the path of CIS on green behaviors. Further heterogeneity analysis shows that the influence path of CIS on green behavior is different among diverse gender groups, incentive choice preference groups, and family types. This study has reference value for improving the design of CIS and constructing diversified incentive mechanism of CIS.

Let me choose what I want: The influence of incentive choice flexibility on the quality of crowdsourcing solutions to innovation problems

Organizations increasingly engage in crowdsourcing to find solutions to their innovation problems, but many of these solutions are of low quality. This could be because organizations do not really know what motivates each individual participant to engage in crowdsourcing, and thus offer the same incentives to all. As a ‘one-size-fits-all’ incentive structure is not optimal due to divergent participant motives, in this paper, we aim to empirically investigate how providing participants with incentive choice flexibility impacts solution quality. Based on a between-subject field experiment, we find that participants who have an opportunity to choose their preferred incentive spend much more time developing their solutions and come up with higher quality solutions than those who are offered a single incentive option. Our study contributes to the literature by highlighting the importance of adopting a flexible incentive structure to improve the quality of the crowdsourced solutions, and by suggesting that an exclusive focus on how a single incentive type (either non-monetary or monetary) impacts solution quality is unsuitable for estimating such impact correctly.

Causal Inference of Social Experiments Using Orthogonal Designs

Orthogonal arrays are a powerful class of experimental designs that has been widely used to determine efficient arrangements of treatment factors in randomized controlled trials. Despite its popularity, the method is seldom used in social sciences. Social experiments must cope with randomization compromises such as noncompliance that often prevent the use of elaborate designs. We present a novel application of orthogonal designs that addresses the particular challenges arising in social experiments. We characterize the identification of counterfactual variables as a finite mixture problem in which choice incentives, rather than treatment factors, are randomly assigned. We show that the causal inference generated by an orthogonal array of incentives greatly outperforms a traditional design.

Evaluating the Impact of Incentives on Clinical Trial Participation: Protocol for a Mixed Methods, Community-Engaged Study.

BackgroundMonetary incentives in research are frequently used to support participant recruitment and retention. However, there are scant empirical data regarding how researchers decide upon the type and amount of incentives offered. Likewise, there is little guidance to assist study investigators and institutional review boards (IRBs) in their decision-making on incentives. Monetary incentives, in addition to other factors such as the risk of harm or other intangible benefits, guide individuals’ decisions to enroll in research studies. These factors emphasize the need for evidence-informed guidance for study investigators and IRBs when determining the type and amount of incentives to provide to research participants.ObjectiveThe specific aims of our research project are to (1) characterize key stakeholders’ views on and assessments of incentives in biomedical HIV research; (2) reach consensus among stakeholders on the factors that are considered when choosing research incentives, including consensus on the relative importance of such factors; and (3) pilot-test the use of the guidance developed via aims 1 and 2 by presenting stakeholders with vignettes of hypothetical research studies for which they will choose corresponding incentive types.MethodsOur 2-year study will involve monthly, active engagement with a stakeholder advisory board of people living with HIV, researchers, and IRB members. For aim 1, we will conduct a nationwide survey (N=300) among people living with HIV to understand their views regarding the incentives used in HIV research. For aim 2, we will collect qualitative data by conducting focus groups with people living with HIV (n=60) and key informant interviews with stakeholders involved in HIV research (people living with HIV, IRB members, and biomedical HIV researchers: n=36) to extend and deepen our understanding of how incentives in HIV research are perceived. These participants will also complete a conjoint analysis experiment to gain an understanding of the relative importance of key HIV research study attributes and the impact that these attributes have on study participation. The data from the nationwide survey (aim 1) will be triangulated with the qualitative and conjoint analysis data (aim 2) to create 25 vignettes that describe hypothetical HIV research studies. Finally, individuals from each stakeholder group will select the most appropriate incentive that they feel should be used in each of the 25 vignettes (aim 3).ResultsThe stakeholder advisory board began monthly meetings in March 2021. All study aims are expected to be completed by December 2022.ConclusionsBy studying the role of incentives in HIV clinical trial participation, we will establish a decision-making paradigm to guide the choice of incentives for HIV research and, eventually, other types of similar research and facilitate the ethical recruitment of clinical research participants.Trial RegistrationClinicalTrials.gov NCT04809636; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04809636International Registered Report Identifier (IRRID)DERR1-10.2196/33608

Research on Incentive Choice of Public Order Based on a Survey of Shared Bicycle Parking

Taking the shared bicycle parking order as the starting point, a variety of scenarios (daily, hurry, and other people’s violations) and two freeloading psychological incentives (speculation and conformity) are constructed. It is believed that (1) The effect of incentives on individual travelers is limited, and there are certain internal distortions in the two-dimensional effects of norms and travel. (2) Incentives are effective for speculative travelers, while they have no significant effect on herd mentality travelers. Even drive travelers with a strong sense of social norms deviate from normative behavior. (3) Travelers with stronger speculative psychology are more sensitive to the time loss that may be embedded in incentives. (4) The range of available incentives with unique characteristics is different. The applicability of electronic fences is relatively stronger.

What do they want? Web-based survey incentive preferences among college students

Offering incentives is a survey research best practice; however, little is known about what kind of incentives college students, a frequently sampled population for health research, prefer. To fill this gap, N=415 undergraduates took a web-based survey with four incentive options. Cross-tabulation analyses with the chi-square statistic and Cramer’s V were used to compare incentive selection by demographic variables. Participants most commonly selected e-gift cards to Amazon and a popular coffee chain; incentive preferences varied based on demographics. Providing incentive choice and considering the preferences of specific priority populations may help to increase web-based survey response rates among college students.

Divergent effects of container port choice incentives on users' behavior

Port choice decisions are often considered to be based on unambiguous choice criteria. The authors examine how port users' evaluation of these criteria can differ and how this may affect actors' incentive structure and decision making, and ultimately port performance. Apart from ports' physical characteristics, the paper considers port policy and freight market conditions as components of actors' incentive structures. As port users interact, each actor's decision making has consequences for the incentives offered to others – with an important role for strategic behavior. The aggregate of port users' decisions affects a port's throughput, cargo composition, and value added, and has implications for handling efficiency. This paper combines these insights within an overarching framework linking port characteristics, policy, and freight market conditions to port user choice behavior and the consequences for ports.The paper explores various facets of this framework using the case of how the Port of Rotterdam competes along the Hamburg–Le Havre range, drawing on port throughput data on various levels of detail and in-depth interviews with a representative selection of port stakeholders. It shows that there is a downside to ports being particularly attractive to carriers, in that the port that offers the most incentives to carriers disproportionately attracts relatively low-value activities: inefficient calls and a large share of empty containers, along with a strong import/export imbalance. Interview findings contextualize the findings from the data and elaborate further on the mechanisms underpinning these observations. Most importantly, the attractiveness of a port for carriers does not always translate into attractiveness for shippers. The challenge for port policy is to balance the port's positioning toward its different categories of users and achieve a congruent value proposition for all port users.

Why Female Decision‐Makers Shy away from Promoting Competition

SummaryIncentivizing subordinates is a crucial task of anyone in a decision‐making role. However, little is known about the mechanisms behind selection of different types of incentives. Our laboratory experiment characterizes the ways in which male and female decision‐makers assign incentives, and how these choices are perceived by those affected by them. We find that women are significantly less likely to select “competitive” incentives based on comparative performance of workers, particularly in the treatment where their workers can observe their gender. The results are not due to priming but are rather consistent with the explanation that women conform to gender stereotypes in anticipation of subsequent evaluation by workers. Indeed, female decision‐makers are significantly underrated relative to comparable males, even after controlling for incentive choice and an extensive set of individual characteristics. The gender difference in competency ratings can be attributed to male workers rating female decision‐makers disproportionately lower relative to their male counterparts. The gender gap in ratings appears to arise because of gender per se and not due to a differential impact of incentives on decision‐makers' gender.

ANALISIS IMPLEMENTASI PERDA RENCANA TATA RUANG WILAYAH DALAM MEWUJUDKAN PEMBANGUNAN BERKELANJUTAN BERWAWASAN LINGKUNGAN DI KABUPATEN BENGKULU TENGAH

This scientific research was conducted to find out the description of the implementation of the Regional Regulation on Regional Spatial Planning in realizing environmentally sustainable development in Bengkulu Tengah Regency. The focus of this research is on the implementation of the policy of providing Green Open Space in the development of urban areas, namely the City Parks that have been built. The method used in this study uses descriptive qualitative methods with a case study approach. Data analysis is based on techniques commonly used in communication messages, namely data collection, data classification, data interpretation and meaning of research results. The results of the study were viewed from four aspects, namely the determination of zoning, licensing issues, choice of incentives and disincentives, and community participation. From this aspect, it is known that in the construction of City Parks as a form of implementation of the policy of providing Green Open Space in the development of urban areas in Bengkulu Regency, the principle of environmentally sustainable development has not been maximally realized. First, the determination of City Park zoning is carried out unilaterally by the government without coordinating with the community. Secondly, the issue of licensing where the construction of the City Park permit location is unknown to the public. Third, the choice of incentives and disincentives provided by the government is still too small and does not prioritize the interests of the community. Finally, the participation of the community in the construction of the City Park is still very lacking because the government is not transparent regarding the development planning that will be carried out.

Why Female Decision-Makers Shy Away From Promoting Competition

Incentivizing subordinates is a crucial task of anyone in a decision-making role. However, little is known about the mechanisms behind selection of different types of incentives. Our laboratory experiment characterizes the ways in which male and female decision-makers assign incentives, and how these choices are perceived by those affected by them. We find that women are significantly less likely to select “competitive” incentives based on comparative performance of workers, particularly in the treatment where their workers can observe their gender. The results are not due to priming, but are rather consistent with the explanation that women conform to gender stereotypes in anticipation of subsequent evaluation by workers. Indeed, female decision-makers are significantly underrated relative to comparable males, even after controlling for incentive choice and an extensive set of individual characteristics. The gender difference in competency ratings can be attributed to male workers rating female decision-makers disproportionately lower relative to their male counterparts. The gender gap in ratings appears to arise because of gender per se, and not due to a differential impact of incentives by decision-maker’s gender.

A commitment contract to achieve virologic suppression in poorly adherent patients with HIV/AIDS.

Assess whether a commitment contract informed by behavioral economics leads to persistent virologic suppression among HIV-positive patients with poor antiretroviral therapy (ART) adherence. Single-center pilot randomized clinical trial and a nonrandomized control group. Publicly funded HIV clinic in Atlanta, Georgia, USA. The study involved three arms. First, participants in the provider visit incentive (PVI) arm received $30 after attending each scheduled provider visit. Second, participants in the incentive choice arm were given a choice between the above arrangement and a commitment contract that made the $30 payment conditional on both attending the provider visit and meeting an ART adherence threshold. Third, the passive control arm received routine care and no incentives. A total of 110 HIV-infected adults with a recent plasma HIV-1 viral load more than 200 copies/ml despite ART. The sample sizes of the three groups were as follows: PVI, n = 21; incentive choice, n = 19; and passive control, n = 70. Virologic suppression (plasma HIV-1 viral load ≤200 copies/ml) at the end of the incentive period and at an unanticipated postincentive study visit approximately 3 months later. The odds of suppression were higher in the incentive choice arm than in the passive control arm at the postincentive visit (adjusted odds ratio 3.93, 95% confidence interval 1.19-13.04, P = 0.025). The differences relative to the passive control arm at the end of the incentive period and relative to the PVI arm at both points in time were not statistically significant. Commitment contracts can improve ART adherence and virologic suppression. ClinicalTrials.gov identifier NCT01455740.

Investigating incentives that encouraged and can encourage Polish and UK-based prosumers to engage in knowledge sharing

Prosumers’ knowledge is increasingly becoming an integral and important element in business strategy regardless of the country. A major challenge for enterprises involves motivating prosumers to share their knowledge. This problem is addressed by incentives linked to the knowledge sharing activities of prosumers. Previous research showed that prosumers are willing to share knowledge, but only under the condition of obtaining certain benefits, rewards or fulfilling other personal goals in return. The purpose of this paper is to investigate which incentives encouraged and would encourage Polish and UK-based prosumers to engage in knowledge sharing with enterprises. The reported outcomes are the result of a questionnaire survey that yielded responses from 783 Polish and 171 UK-based prosumers. The results indicate there are statistically significant differences between Polish and UK-based prosumers in the particular choice of incentives that encouraged them and would encourage them to engage in knowledge sharing.

Social norms of work ethic and incentives in organizations

In this paper, I model the relation between the dissemination of social norms of work effort (work ethic) in a given society and the choice of incentives by firms, and I motivate it by presenting evidence from three different datasets that suggests that work ethic is correlated with the intensity of firms’ incentives. When the effort choices of different agents in a firm are complementary, having hard-working coworkers makes an agent more productive. Therefore, in equilibrium, she will work harder. Foreseeing that a work ethic is more useful to hard-working agents, parents will be more willing to transmit it in societies in which the probability that their offspring will have coworkers with strong work ethic is higher. I then expand the model to incorporate the firm technology choice, allowing firms to decide between complementary and separable production processes. In societies with wide dissemination of work ethic, firms will want effort to be complementary (as in modern production processes), while the opposite is true when the dissemination of work ethic is narrow. Finally, I investigate the comparative dynamics of the model.

The differential effect of compensation structures on the likelihood that firms accept new patients by insurance type.

Adequate access to primary care is not universally achieved in many countries, including the United States, particularly for vulnerable populations. In this paper we use multiple years of the U.S.-based Community Tracking Survey to examine whether a variety of physician compensation structures chosen by practices influence the likelihood that the practice takes new patients from a variety of different types of insurance. Specifically, we examine the roles of customer satisfaction and quality measures on the one hand, and individual physician productivity measures on the other hand, in determining whether or not firms are more likely to accept patients who have private insurance, Medicare, or Medicaid. In the United States these different types of insurance mechanisms cover populations with different levels of vulnerability. Medicare (elderly and disabled individuals) and Medicaid (low income households) enrollees commonly have lower ability to pay any cost sharing associated with care, are more likely to have multiple comorbidities (and so be more costly to treat), and may be more sensitive to poor access. Further, these two insurers also generally reimburse less generously than private payors. Thus, if lower reimbursements interact with compensation mechanisms to discourage physician practices from accepting new patients, highly vulnerable populations may be at even greater risk than generally appreciated. We control for the potential endogeneity of incentive choice using a multi-level propensity score method. We find that the compensation incentives chosen by practices are statistically and economically significant predictors for the types of new patients that practices accept. These findings have important implications for both policy makers and private health care systems.

Behavioral Public Choice: The Behavioral Paradox of Government Policy

Although government agencies increasingly use behavioral irrationalities as a justification for government intervention, the paradox is that these same government policies are also subject to similar behavioral inadequacies across a broad range of policies. This article develops an analysis of behavioral public choice in which we recognize that government officials are human and subject to behavioral anomalies and to public choice incentives that could further lead to welfare-reducing policies. Moreover, the existence of behavioral failures by the general public will lead to public pressures on government agencies to foster policies in response to these behavioral inadequacies. This article presents a series of policy examples indicating how government policies as well are subject to behavioral and political biases.

Opponent actor learning (OpAL): modeling interactive effects of striatal dopamine on reinforcement learning and choice incentive.

The striatal dopaminergic system has been implicated in reinforcement learning (RL), motor performance, and incentive motivation. Various computational models have been proposed to account for each of these effects individually, but a formal analysis of their interactions is lacking. Here we present a novel algorithmic model expanding the classical actor-critic architecture to include fundamental interactive properties of neural circuit models, incorporating both incentive and learning effects into a single theoretical framework. The standard actor is replaced by a dual opponent actor system representing distinct striatal populations, which come to differentially specialize in discriminating positive and negative action values. Dopamine modulates the degree to which each actor component contributes to both learning and choice discriminations. In contrast to standard frameworks, this model simultaneously captures documented effects of dopamine on both learning and choice incentive-and their interactions-across a variety of studies, including probabilistic RL, effort-based choice, and motor skill learning.

Impacts of subsidy policies on vaccination decisions in contact networks

To motivate more people to participate in vaccination campaigns, various subsidy policies are often supplied by government and the health sectors. However, these external incentives may also alter the vaccination decisions of the broader public, and hence the choice of incentive needs to be carefully considered. Since human behavior and the networking-constrained interactions among individuals significantly impact the evolution of an epidemic, here we consider the voluntary vaccination on human contact networks. To this end, two categories of typical subsidy policies are considered: (1) under the free subsidy policy, the total amount of subsidy is distributed to a certain fraction of individual and who are vaccinated without personal cost, and (2) under the partial-offset subsidy policy, each vaccinated person is offset by a certain amount of subsidy. A vaccination decision model based on evolutionary game theory is established to study the effects of these different subsidy policies on disease control. Simulations suggest that, because the partial-offset subsidy policy encourages more people to take vaccination, its performance is significantly better than that of the free subsidy policy. However, an interesting phenomenon emerges in the partial-offset scenario: with limited amount of total subsidy, a moderate subsidy rate for each vaccinated individual can guarantee the group-optimal vaccination, leading to the maximal social benefits, while such an optimal phenomenon is not evident for the free subsidy scenario.

Participation and Incentive Choice of Participants in an Early Vehicle Retirement Program in Quebec, Canada

Early vehicle retirement programs are designed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, improve air quality and traffic safety, and stimulate the economy by replacing the automobile fleet with vehicles that pollute less. The Province of Quebec's early vehicle retirement program also was designed as a mode shift tool by offering six incentives that included transit passes, rebates on bicycles and vehicles, and membership in a car-sharing cooperative. The characteristics associated with program participation and incentive choice were assessed. Between 2009 and 2011, more than 40,000 participants registered with the program and provided address, choice of incentive, age of vehicle, gender, and age. Census data provided measures of the built and social environments near participants' residences. The determinants of program participation rates were assessed with the use of Tobit regressions. Incentive choice was modeled with a multinomial logistic regression. Participation rates were high in low-density metropolitan areas and high-density nonmetropolitan areas as well as in areas with low unemployment rates, few immigrants, and young populations. Transit incentives were popular in dense metro politan centers with a large proportion of women, young people, and high incomes. Older participants were likely to choose car rebates, whereas bicycle incentives were associated with young male participants. Participants in low-income areas were likely to choose the cash incentive. The addition of incentive options that are feasible in low-density or low-income areas should be considered. Alternative transportation incentives are chosen primarily in dense urban environments where a mode shift is feasible.

Becoming the Fifth Branch

Observers of our federal republic have long acknowledged that a fourth branch of government comprising administrative agencies has arisen to join the original three established by the Constitution. In this article, we focus our attention on the emergence of perhaps yet another, comprising financial self-regulatory organizations. In the late eighteenth century, long before the creation of state and federal securities authorities, the financial industry created its own self-regulatory organizations. These private institutions then coexisted with the public authorities for much of the past century in a complementary array of informal and formal policing mechanisms. That equilibrium, however, appears to be growing increasingly imbalanced, as financial SROs such as FINRA transform from “self-regulatory” into “quasigovernmental” organizations. We describe this change through an account that describes how SROs are losing their independence, growing distant from their industry members, and accruing rulemaking, enforcement, and adjudicative powers that more closely resemble governmental agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. We then consider the confluence of forces that might be driving this increasingly governmental shift, including among others, demographic changes in the style and size of retail investments in the securities markets, the one-way ratchet effect of high-publicity failures and scandals, and the public choice incentives of regulators and the compliance industry. The process by which such self-regulatory organizations shed their independence for an increasingly governmental role is an undesirable but largely inexorable development, and we offer some initial ideas for how to forestall it.