Quotes About Incentives

When we cut the price for bananas by 1 ruble, we sell 100 tons a day more... There are people who live within their budget.

We daily witness the beneficial effect produced to the community by the institution of premiums, held out to encourage the inventions of ingenious mechanics.

The theory of mechanism design can be thought of as the 'engineering' side of economic theory.

If you're trying to understand why it is that certain things happen in Sacramento and certain things don't, at the end of the day, it comes down to the issue of incentives: We do what we're incentivized to do.

When I look at China's environmental problems, the real barrier is not lack of technology or money. It's lack of motivation.

The great muckraker Upton Sinclair had expressed a deep insight into the relationship between the world of ideas and the world of practical men: 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.'34

There is a role for carrots and sticks, but to rely on carrots and sticks alone is effective only when we employ donkeys and we are sure exactly what we want the donkeys to do.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.'35

Moral laws are set as a curb and restraint to these exorbitant desires, which they cannot be but by rewards and punishments, that will over-balance the satisfaction any one shall propose to himself in the breach of the law.

The problem is that even top psychiatrists failed to identify them as real threats. And it's not as though psychiatrists lack incentives to get the diagnosis right. Beyond their reputation, professional pride, and desire to help, psychiatrists also have a legal obligation to inform authorities of threats. Families of the Aurora movie theater victims sued Holmes' psychiatrist for not recommending that his patient be confined.

For a foreman, heat-treat seems like a very small kingdom, not much of a prize. There is nothing intrinsically attractive about running that operation, and having only two people to manage makes it seem like no big deal. To prevent it from seeming like a demotion to them, I make a point to go down there periodically on each of the shifts. In talking to the foreman, I drop some rather direct hints that the rewards will be great for anyone who can improve the output of heat-treated parts.

Negative interest rates hurt banks' balance sheets, with the 'wealth effect' on banks overwhelming the small increase in incentives to lend.

Legal behavior is not incompatible with rational, self-interested behavior.

The government grants tax and legal loopholes to real estate investors to encourage them to do a job that the government can't.

I was dead to worldly ambitions, to social vanities, to all the incentives within the compass of her narrow imagination, and I lived under influences utterly invisible to her.

Most people are driven by fear or by avoidance of pain. Only a few are driven by the benefits.

We have a system that increasingly taxes work and subsidizes nonwork.

The productivity now at universities is terrible. Tenure is a terrible idea. It keeps them around forever and they don't have to work hard.

Under the rule of law, if the government wants to prevent firms from outsourcing and offshoring, it enacts legislation and adopts regulations to create the appropriate incentives and discourage undesirable behaviour. It does not bully or threaten particular firms or portray traumatised refugees as a security threat.

If you want better behavior from bankers, then make their financial incentives more like those in the hedge-fund world - where managers have 'skin in the game,' and their net worth is tied to their long-term performance.

We must shore up this institution of marriage: The programs like marriage initiatives in the nation's capital, where couples are given community assistance, education, and financial incentives. They need to get married and to stay married. In the battle against poverty we cannot ignore the central role of family structure.

The legendary wheat-field triumphs came from financial incentives, irrigation, and the return of the rains, and they came at the expense of more important food crops. Long-term growth trends in food production and food production per capita did not change, [and] the Green Revolution years, when separated out, actually marked a slowdown.

It is a basic rule of life that if you reward bad behavior, you get more of it.

By creating a park, and then providing jobs and salaries to local communities, we give economic incentives to people to protect what all of us surely want to preserve.