11.2 Flashcards
four kinds of incentives
monetary, ex ante, private, agent tasks
Awards are
symolic (non monetary), ex-post, public ceremony, purpose tasks
awards: non monetary - incentives: monetary
if the problem is that money provides extrinsic motivations and extrinsic motivation undermines intrinsic motivations and therefore performance is influenced, we dont have that problem with awards because they are symbolic
Ex-ante incentives - ex post award
ex ante meaning before. The incentive is proposed to the actor before the action is performed and then after the action is performed you receive the money that you were promised.
The awards are always ex-post. An actor that wins an oscar for a movie. When the actor and the people working on the movie were producing it and recording it, their first commitment wasnt winning the oskan. That was not the main motivation. The prize comes ex-post, after the action, to recognize something that was very good. The example works better with the nobel prize
awards public ceremony - incentives: private handling
The public ceremony. Its not something that is in addition of an award. It is part of an award. The recognition you receive, the peer and community recognition. It is part of the award its self. a feature of intrinsic motivation is that it wants to be recognized.
A note on incentives
incentives are an agent task
incentivus: small flute used to set the choire on tune
Later used to indicate the coordinating function of the trumpet dictating the running pace for soldiers in battle
Incentives make individual agents goals (intrinsic) converge towards one objective set by the principal (extrinsic)
main claim: awards crowd in intrinsic motivation
Awards have the opposite effect as incentives
Incentives want to be recognized, but spiderman wouldve done it anyways.
They are scarce and difficult to win (uncertainty)
They are symboolic, they recognize
They are tied to a purpose that the person judges valuable
Can awards substitute incentives
pure incentives and pure awards are rare
Think about best employee of the month. Is it an incentive or an award?
usually awards are recurrent, so they might motivate
People can be extrinsically motivated by honour, glory, recognition (symbolic prizes)
If the emloyer needs to use awards, then he/she tries to control intrinsic motivations and we are back to the motivational crowding out
pure awards are rare
Nobel prize: a gold medal, a diploma, and a monetary award of 10 million SEK approx 1,145,000 usd
Appreciation token by tilburg university (150 euros) for teachers flexibility during online teaching
Bruni et.al. 2020 (on awards and incentives)
They explore the features of pure incentives and pure awards
They understand that incentives and awards are complementary, not alternative
They set up a lab experiment to test their hypotheses
They are against reductionsim: intrinsic and extrinsic motivations are equally important
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