Negative Incentives Research Articles

Beyond deficit assessment in bilingual primary schools

ABSTRACT In this paper, we analyze the harm that high-stakes standardized tests in the U.S. render to maintenance-oriented dual-language bilingual primary schools and, in particular, to minoritized bilingual learners. We argue that these schools must resist the negative incentives and prevailing logic that passing standardized tests is crucial for students’ future success and act to mitigate the potential harm to their school missions and pedagogy that this form of assessment presents. The alternative anti-deficit qualitative approaches to assessment we describe here rely on assessments of student learning and knowledge that are strengths-based, culturally aware and mindful, and seek to motivate students to accomplish ambitious, albeit differentiated, goals. These assessments carry a tone of empowerment and cultural affirmation and foster positive academic identity development of emergent bilingual children. We hope here to persuade that these assessments will assist dual-language bilingual primary schools to resist the neoliberal pressure to tie high-stakes decisions to standardized testing, which impair the cultural, educational, and personal development of their most vulnerable students.

The Ex-Middle Problem for Law-and-Economics

Abstract Law-and-economics has an ex-middle problem. First, there is the problem of preserving law’s deterrent power, and its ability to influence later behavior, even when it is sensible to renegotiate incentives later on. The issue is hardly limited to contract renegotiation, and the ubiquity of this kind of ex-middle thinking is examined here. Second, there is the idea that the more our thinking is driven by an ex-ante perspective, the more it distances itself from common ethical intuitions that tend to involve ex-post observations, or simply results. Solving ex-middle problems by tinkering with incentives leads to increased objections from ethically oriented audiences, who find efficiency claims unattractive when they burden individuals in the interest of future unidentifiable beneficiaries. This conflict makes it hard for law-and-economics to have its deserved influence on lawmaking. When law renegotiates with positive incentives, it reduces its ex-ante impact; when it relies on negative incentives, either ex-post or ex-middle, accompanied by a readjustment of the optimal ex-ante rule, it runs the risk of offending ethical sentiments, and then it rarely takes hold. One aim here is to draw attention to ex-middle recalibrations, and the second aim is to suggest that a law-and-economics approach is most successful when it devises efficient rules that are not at odds with ethical sentiments.

The Portrait of a Scientist in the Light of Synergetics

The article is devoted to an outstanding Russian criminologist Yuri Vladimirovich Golik. Yu.V. Golik, being a creative person, drew attention to one of the trends of modern world science - synergetics - at the beginning of his scientific career. The synergetic approach means a fundamentally new view of the development of nature and society, in contrast to classical paradigms in science. The young scientist was attracted by the interdisciplinary character of synergetics. Later, in his work «Synergetics and Crime», he singled out the main parameters of the synergetic approach important for criminology: interaction that generates a new quality; self-organization of open systems with nonlinear feedbacks, including understanding of crime in the light of synergetic approach as an open self-organizing system, etc. The main stages of the life of Yu.V. Golik are indirectly related to synergistic principles in one way or another. His graduation thesis, and then his Ph.D. thesis, are devoted to the problem of an accidental criminal. Accidentality was considered by the author from a synergetic point of view as a way of comprehending internally hidden regularities. Engaging in the fight against corruption, Yu.V. Golik also draws attention to a need for non-traditional approaches, both to study it and to eradicate it. In a monograph written in co-authorship with V.I. Karasev, «Corruption as a Mechanism of Social Degradation», a paradoxical conclusion is made, in a spirit of synergetics, that a change in legal reality not only mobilizes socially-organized population to solve radically new global problems, but also objectively contributes to socially dangerous behavior. Such a warning is important for developing adequate means of crime prevention even at the stage of designing legal reforms. Synergetic principles were applied by Yu.V. Golik in his doctoral dissertation «Positive stimuli in criminal law (concept, content, prospects)». Yuriy Vladimirovich publically discussed such unusual law regulation issues as the consequences of positive incentives, the «boundlessness» of positive incentives in contrast to the limited nature of negative incentives, etc. Against the backdrop of doubts raised by some scholars about the appropriateness of the synergetic approach in social sciences and, in particular, in law, it should be noted that the synergy of Yu.V. Golik was justifiably applied in those times when a new unconventional understanding of social and legal reality was required.

Incentive measures to avoid the illegal parking of dockless shared bikes: the relationships among incentive forms, intensity and policy compliance

The recent development of shared-bike systems in China has brought convenience for users, as well as great pressure on bicycle parking management. There is limited empirical evidence regarding the effectiveness of incentive measures from the perspective of guiding people to park their shared bikes regularly. By defining a mixed logit model based on the theory of planned behaviour, this study focuses on exploring the conformity effects of policy compliance among dockless shared-bike users in the behavioural decisions of bicycle parking. A total of 453 respondents who had just finished parking a shared bike were invited to provide intentional information by participating in a stated preference survey. The empirical results indicated that, as a positive and negative incentive measure, both monetary rewards and financial penalties can motivate people to park the shared bikes in an unsaturated place near their destinations. However, the significant difference is that, with increasing incentive intensity, a monetary reward can motivate shared-bike users to shift the bicycles away more effectively than a financial penalty, especially when the shifting distance requires more than 10 min of walking. In addition, some factors used to characterize the individual heterogeneity, such as gender, education and searching time for dockless shared bikes, also have obvious impacts on policy compliance regarding bicycle parking guidance. These findings can help policy makers to create appropriate measures in the form of incentives to reduce illegal parking by shared-bike users.

Investing in local capacity to respond to a federal environmental mandate: Forest & economic impacts of the Green Municipality Program in the Brazilian Amazon

Abstract Over the past decade, the Brazilian federal government has offered a negative collective incentive to reduce deforestation by ‘blacklisting’ the municipalities in the Amazon with the highest deforestation rates. As for any unfunded mandate, the responses to blacklisting depend on both local incentives and local capacities. We evaluate a state program − Programa Municipios Verdes (PMV) or the Green Municipality Program – to increase the capacity of municipal governments in the state of Para to respond to this federal incentive. The PMV is voluntary, as municipal governments choose whether to participate. To control for differences due to self-selection into the program, we employ quasi-experimental methods: two-way, fixed-effects regressions in matched samples of municipalities; and the synthetic control method that compares outcomes in a participating municipality to outcomes in a weighted blend of control municipalities. Neither approach suggests that the PMV reduced deforestation beyond the effect of the blacklist. We hypothesize that municipalities joined the PMV to ameliorate the costs of complying with blacklist requirements, including the costs of exiting the blacklist. We show that the PMV increased total value added – with substantial heterogeneity - in participating blacklisted municipalities, and that these gains likely are not due to agricultural intensification. They may result from reductions in compliance risk and cost that make economic investments in a municipality more appealing. In the long run, this could make forest conservation more socially and politically sustainable.

A model of a team contest, with an application to incentives under list proportional representation

We develop a model of a team contest for multiple, indivisible prizes. Team members exert costly effort to improve their team's success. We analyze two intrateam allocation rules. Under a list rule, prizes are allocated according to a predetermined list. Under an egalitarian rule, prizes are allocated according to a fair lottery. We show that which allocation rule maximizes team success depends on the degree of complementarity between members' efforts and the convexity of the individual cost of effort function. We then apply the model to the context of elections under proportional representation with both open and closed lists. We derive conditions under which closed lists generate stronger incentives than open lists. Our results offer a rationale for the lack of evidence on the negative incentive effects of closed lists.

Ketamine normalizes subgenual cingulate cortex hyper-activity in depression.

Mounting evidence supports the rapid antidepressant efficacy of the N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor antagonist, ketamine, for treating major depressive disorder (MDD); however, its neural mechanism of action remains poorly understood. Subgenual anterior cingulate cortex (sgACC) hyper-activity during rest has been consistently implicated in the pathophysiology of MDD, potentially driven in partby excessive hippocampal gluatmatergic efferents to sgACC. Reduction of sgACC activity has been associated with successful antidepressant treatment. This study aimed to examine whether task-based sgACC activity was higher in patients with MDD compared to controls and to determine whether this activity was altered by single-dose ketamine. In Study 1, patients with MDD (N = 28) and healthy controls (N = 20) completed task-based functional magnetic resonance imaging using an established incentive-processing task. In Study 2, a second cohort of patients with MDD (N = 14) completed the same scanning protocol at baseline and following a 40 min infusion of ketamine (0.5 mg/kg). Task-based activation of sgACC was examined with a seed-driven analysis assessing group differences and changes from pre to post treatment. Patients with MDD showed higher sgACC activation to positive and negative monetary incentives compared to controls, associated with anhedonia and anxiety, respectively. In addition, patients with MDD had higher resting-state functional connectivity between hippocampus and sgACC, associated with sgACC hyper-activation to positive incentives, but not negative incentives. Finally, ketamine reduced sgACC hyper-activation to positive incentives, but not negative incentives. These findings suggest a neural mechanism by which ketamine exerts its antidepressant efficacy, via rapid blunting of aberrant sgACC hyper-reactivity to positive incentives.

Refining China’s grassland policies: an interdisciplinary and ex-ante analysis

China is about to embark on a new round of grassland policies as part of its 14th Five-Year-Plan. Although current grassland policies have generally been perceived positively in arresting widespread grassland degradation, concerns have arisen that the current policies may not be effective in achieving the desired reduction in livestock numbers. Furthermore, there are concerns the incentive-based payments that are part of these policy programs may not reflect herder opportunity costs or the marginal environmental benefits of the program, with associated issues of herder satisfaction and compliance. Changes to current policy settings are being considered in response to these concerns. This paper reports on an interdisciplinary and ex-ante analysis of alternative policy settings affecting grazing and livestock management in terms of their environmental impacts, net social benefits and other impacts. The analysis finds that a bundle of instruments involving both positive and negative herder incentives is needed if desired stocking rates are to be achieved. The impact on herder incomes, both positive and negative depending on the grassland biome, along with transaction costs of implementing the policies, have the most influence on net social benefits.

Do motives matter? A comparison between positive and negative incentives in students’ willingness to malinger

The educational system today often relies on incentives in order to motivate students. However, it might also encourage students to engage in deceptive behaviour (e.g. malingering) in order to reach certain benefits. Hereby, we investigated whether students would intentionally fabricate symptoms (i.e. malinger) when confronted with a positive academic benefit (gaining recommendation letter, n = 88), or when given a negative incentive scenario that could be avoided by malingering (n = 88). Groups did not differ in: (i) their motivation to malinger; (ii) symptom choice, nor in (iii) the reporting strategy. Overall, 94% of students would, to a varying degree, malinger. Fever, dizziness/nausea, and indigestion/diarrhoea were the most frequently chosen symptoms and providing elaborative symptoms descriptions was students’ dominant malingering strategy.

Surprise-Based JND Estimation for Images

In visual perception, the neural response is evoked by the central stimulus and inhibited by the surrounding stimuli. These two stimuli can be regarded as the positive and negative incentives for perception. In this letter, the aftereffect of two incentives is incorporated into the just noticeable distortion (JND) estimation to avoid the threshold overestimation issue. In neuroscience, how an incentive affects an observer is measured by the surprise of this incentive which is estimated by the residual self-information according to the effective coding theory. Considering the competition biases, we define the product of the residual self-information and the biases, named as perceptual surprise, to measure the positive effect. As for the negative effect, we measure it with the average surprise (i.e., local Shannon entropy). Besides, visual signals are processed hierarchically in the HVS. To simplify the JND modeling process, the HVS is divided into two levels and the perception is simply divided into two stages. In each stage, the threshold is estimated individually and the total JND threshold is obtained by non-linear superposition of two stage thresholds. Experimental results show that the proposed JND model outperforms the existing pixel-based JND models and effectively avoid the threshold overestimation issue.

Strong Negative Incentive and Weak Implicit Negotiation: The Campaign-style Environment Governance in China

As the region with the most serious air pollution in China, Hebei Province, which is close to Beijing, is facing stringent environmental regulation. In face of the continuous pressure from the central government, most areas in Hebei Province, represented by Handan City, have carried out high-intensity campaign-style environmental governance. However, Chengde City, which is also in Hebei Province, adopted different strategies. In order to explain the differences, this paper constructs a resource mobilization framework for the campaign-style governance, namely “control-incentive-negotiation” framework. The framework is tested by taking the air pollution regulation in Handan and Chengde in 2017-2018 as examples. The study found that despite the unprecedentedly strengthened authority of the central government since the 18th CCP National Congress, under the combined effect of theater politics, differentiated incentives and implicit negotiation, if a region faces too many political tasks, the local government will choose the operations and policies that are the most beneficial for itself. The research results is helpful to understand the campaign-style environmental governance in China, as well as the vertical intergovernmental relations.

China’s poverty alleviation over the last 40 years: successes and challenges

Over the past 40 years, China has made significant progress towards its poverty alleviation goals. The rural population under the current poverty line has decreased by 739.9 million. China has contributed to more than 70 per cent of world poverty reduction. To better promote the new anti‐poverty strategy and to serve as a reference for poverty alleviation in other developing countries, this paper summarises the main experiences of China’s poverty alleviation over the past 40 years and then discusses the challenges associated with implementing the targeted poverty alleviation policy in the new era. China’s experience with poverty alleviation includes development‐oriented poverty alleviation, improving self‐development capabilities of the poor population, encouraging multiple subjects to participate in poverty alleviation and focusing on innovation and ways to improve poverty alleviation. Although China’s poverty alleviation initiatives have achieved significant successes, there are still several challenges that should be of concern in the coming years, such as the diminishing marginal effect of financial inputs on poverty alleviation, the resulting negative incentives for the poor to improve their internal motivations and the insufficient participation of markets and social forces in poverty alleviation. Given these challenges, this paper provides suggestions for anti‐poverty policies beyond 2020.

Reward and punishment in climate change dilemmas

Mitigating climate change effects involves strategic decisions by individuals that may choose to limit their emissions at a cost. Everyone shares the ensuing benefits and thereby individuals can free ride on the effort of others, which may lead to the tragedy of the commons. For this reason, climate action can be conveniently formulated in terms of Public Goods Dilemmas often assuming that a minimum collective effort is required to ensure any benefit, and that decision-making may be contingent on the risk associated with future losses. Here we investigate the impact of reward and punishment in this type of collective endeavors — coined as collective-risk dilemmas — by means of a dynamic, evolutionary approach. We show that rewards (positive incentives) are essential to initiate cooperation, mostly when the perception of risk is low. On the other hand, we find that sanctions (negative incentives) are instrumental to maintain cooperation. Altogether, our results are gratifying, given the a-priori limitations of effectively implementing sanctions in international agreements. Finally, we show that whenever collective action is most challenging to succeed, the best results are obtained when both rewards and sanctions are synergistically combined into a single policy.

Effects of negative incentive shifts in food reward on rats' consumption of concurrent ethanol solutions.

Frustration stress, typically operationalized as the unexpected loss of reinforcement, has been shown to engender substance use. Abrupt reductions in reinforcer magnitude likely also function as frustration stressors. These negative incentive shifts were previously shown to produce tap- and sweetened-water drinking in rats. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether these shifts in food reward would occasion oral ethanol self-administration. Nine male Long-Evans rats operated on a two-component multiple fixed-ratio schedule with signaled components producing either a large (4 pellets) or small (1pellet) reinforcer. Components were pseudorandomly arranged to present 4 transitions between past and upcoming reinforcer magnitudes: small-to-large, small-to-small, large-to-large, and large-to-small (negative incentive shift). Experiment 1 investigated the effects of negative incentive shifts on consumption of concurrent, freely available 10% sucrose, 10% sucrose plus 10% ethanol, and following sucrose fading, 10% ethanol. Experiment 2 entailed continuation of schedule contingencies with a dose manipulation of 4 ethanol concentrations (0, 5, 10, and 20%) to assess dose-dependent differences in transition-type control and consumption. A lever-press extinction condition was then conducted with 10% ethanol availability. In this novel model of frustration stress, negative incentive shifts prompted ethanol self-administration at each dose investigated, whereas the other transitions did not.

Shaping China’s rise: the reordering of US alliances and defence partnerships in East Asia

The US-led system of alliances and defence partnerships in East Asia has undergone profound change since the end of the Cold War. The so-called “hub-and-spokes” system of bilateral alliances has been gradually supplemented by a “networked security architecture”—a network of interwoven bilateral, minilateral and multilateral defence arrangements between the US and its regional allies and partners, in which China is also included through a variety of cooperation channels. This paper shows that, from Washington’s perspective, the networked security architecture is not merely a means to externally balance a revisionist China, as Structural Realist analyses contend. Rather, the US has sought to broaden the composition of the US-led hegemonic order in East Asia by diversifying the range of defence ties with and amongst its allies and partners, but also by seeking to include the PRC in it. Thereby, Washington aims to channel and shape the trajectory of China’s rise within the US-led hegemonic order, from a position of pre-eminence, through a mixture of negative and positive incentives (resistance and accommodation) with the ultimate goal of upholding the existing hegemonic order. To empirically substantiate this argument, the paper relies on a large body of elite interviews with senior US policymakers.

Ranking effect in air pollution governance: Evidence from Chinese cities

Information disclosure in environmental governance, or informational governance conceptualized by Arthur Mol, has been increasingly utilized as a policy instrument to incentivize environmental policy enforcement in not only democratic societies but also authoritarian regimes like China. This study uses an explicit regulation, the air pollution ranking in Chinese cities as an example to illustrate how such informational governance policy instrument has an impact on local air pollution governance. Empirical evidence is based on monthly comprehensive air quality index ranking data of 74 key monitoring cities in China from 2013 to 2018. And a regression discontinuity design is applied to explore the relationship between air pollution ranking and air quality improvement in localities. The results show that (1) air quality of the bottom ten cities in the ranking will improve in the coming month compared with their counterparts; (2) such improvement happens upon the releasing of the ranking, but would not last for more than a month; (3) while top ten cities in the ranking do not experience such change in air quality. Therefore, we argue that the air pollution ranking system in China can be a useful informational governance instrument in providing negative incentives for environmental administrations in bottom cities to strengthen air pollution control. However, as a top-down environmental information disclosure program, such ranking institution could only mobilize local air quality governance temporarily. And new institutions ought to be established to further internalized local governments’ environmental externalities.

Sin zanahoria y con garrote: prevalencia del castigo en el diseño institucional de los programas de formalización para sustituir cultivos de uso ilícito en Colombia

Los programas de formalización de la propiedad creados como instrumento para la sustitución de cultivos de uso ilícito se sustentan en el supuesto de que existe una relación entre la seguridad de los derechos de propiedad de los campesinos y la disminución en las áreas que se utilizan para la siembra de cultivos de uso ilícito (incentivo positivo). Esto, por un lado, porque la propiedad conlleva el acceso a bienes públicos y recursos privados, ventajas que se obtienen solo cuando se tiene el dominio sobre un predio. Por otro, la política contiene incentivos negativos, los nuevos propietarios tienen poderosos motivos para no resembrar, puesto que hacerlo implicaría la aplicación de la extinción del dominio. En este artículo mostramos, desde el análisis institucional, que las ventajas de la formalización no son una consecuencia necesaria e inmediata de la titularidad del derecho de dominio, y que, por el contrario, la extinción del dominio sí tiene la potencialidad de ocurrir y de agravar la situación de la población vulnerable, la cual, sin la adecuada dotación de bienes, no podría cumplir por sí misma los compromisos de la formalización.

Exploring optimal institutional incentives for public cooperation

Prosocial incentive can promote cooperation, but providing incentive is costly. Institutions in human society may prefer to use an incentive strategy which is able to promote cooperation at a reasonable cost. However, thus far few works have explored the optimal institutional incentives which minimize related cost for the benefit of public cooperation. In this work, in combination with optimal control theory we thus formulate two optimal control problems to explore the optimal incentive strategies for institutional reward and punishment respectively. By using the approach of Hamilton–Jacobi–Bellman equation for well-mixed populations, we theoretically obtain the optimal positive and negative incentive strategies with the minimal cumulative cost respectively. Additionally, we provide numerical examples to verify that the obtained optimal incentives allow the dynamical system to reach the desired destination at the lowest cumulative cost in comparison with other given incentive strategies. Furthermore, we find that the optimal punishing strategy is a cheaper way for obtaining an expected cooperation level when it is compared with the optimal rewarding strategy.

Positive and negative incentive contrasts lead to relative value perception in ants.

Humans usually assess things not according to their absolute value, but relative to reference points - a main tenant of Prospect Theory. For example, people rate a new salary relative to previous salaries and salaries of their peers, rather than absolute income. We demonstrate a similar effect in an insect: ants expecting to find low-quality food showed higher acceptance of medium-quality food than ants expecting medium quality, and vice versa for high expectations. Further experiments demonstrate that these contrast effects arise from cognitive rather than mere sensory or pre-cognitive perceptual causes. Social information gained inside the nest can also serve as a reference point: the quality of food received from other ants affected the perceived value of food found later. Value judgement is a key element in decision making, and thus relative value perception strongly influences which option is chosen and ultimately how all animals make decisions.

Synergistic third-party rewarding and punishment in the public goods game.

We study the evolution of cooperation in the spatial public goods game in the presence of third-party rewarding and punishment. The third party executes public intervention, punishing groups where cooperation is weak and rewarding groups where cooperation is strong. We consider four different scenarios to determine what works best for cooperation, in particular, neither rewarding nor punishment, only rewarding, only punishment or both rewarding and punishment. We observe strong synergistic effects when rewarding and punishment are simultaneously applied, which are absent if neither of the two incentives or just each individual incentive is applied by the third party. We find that public cooperation can be sustained at comparatively low third-party costs under adverse conditions, which is impossible if just positive or negative incentives are applied. We also examine the impact of defection tolerance and application frequency, showing that the higher the tolerance and the frequency of rewarding and punishment, the more cooperation thrives. Phase diagrams and characteristic spatial distributions of strategies are presented to corroborate these results, which will hopefully prove useful for more efficient public policies in support of cooperation in social dilemmas.