Quotes About Incentives

Call it what you will, incentives are what get people to work harder.

People will always work harder if they're getting well paid and if they're afraid of losing a job which they know will be hard to equal. As is well known, if you pay peanuts, you get monkeys.

The most difficult thing is to recognize that sometimes we too are blinded by our own incentives. Because we don't see how our conflicts of interest work on us.

Every company, every boardroom in which I sit, has a plan, and they have objectives, goals, and a process. And to make it work, the pressure and incentive have to come from the top.

I think that there is a problem with rewards and consequences because in the long run, they rarely work in the ways we hope. In fact, they are likely to backfire.

People are willing to work free, and they are willing to work for a reasonable wage; but offer them just a small payment and they will walk away.

I love the ability to work with very good managers, and to provide the right incentives for them, and truly become a partner with that management, and make that management take a long view.

Go Daddy is not just a job; it's a way of life. Our employees work hard, and offering great incentives is fun and productive for the company.

You can't always get someone where you want to with just sticks. There have to be some carrots, there have to be some other shaping things.

The truth of the matter of is that stimulus money not only doesn't stimulate; it actually reduces output.

We have to stop rewarding bad behavior.

The pollution problem is always seen as someone who was doing something bad that has to be stopped. To me, pollution is doing something bad and good. People don't pollute because they like polluting. They do it because it's a cheaper way of producing something else.

Fight scarcity power and corruption; correct externalities; try to maximise information; get the incentives right; engage with other countries; and most of all embrace markets, which do most of these jobs at the same time.

Premack [a motivational system where a more-preferred activity can be used to reinforce a less-preferred activity] or a rewards system, but with

A goal without real consequences is wishful thinking. Good follow-through doesn't depend on the right intentions. It depends on the right incentives.

Several families interviewed for this book recommended the oldest persuasive tool known to man: bribery. Each child is given some amounts of virtual cash, 25-30 cents, for each hour of good behaviour. The same amount is subtracted from their accounts for breaking the rules. All purchases for fun - whether souvenirs, ice cream, or otherwise - come out of their own individual accounts. No balance, no goodies. This often requires more self-control on the part of the parents than the children.

Yet if states were destroyed, local institutions corrupted, and economic incentives directed towards murder, few of us would behave well.

A ruler should be slow to punish and swift to reward.

Because we tend to be nice to other people when they please us and nasty when they do not, we are statistically punished for being nice and rewarded for being nasty.

For example, children in school are never encouraged to want the material rewards of success. Success is something to be sought for its own sake, certainly not for any wealth it might bring.

Did you know there are more tax breaks for video game companies than for researchers pursuing medical developments or alternate fuels?

Because identities are central to the way people make decisions, any change effort that violates someone's identity is likely doomed to failure. (That's why it's so clumsy when people instinctively reach for "incentives" to change other people's behavior.) So the question is this: How can you make your change a matter of identity rather than a matter of consequences?

The psychologists Amos Tversky and Eldar Shafir offered college students a five-dollar reward for filling out a survey. When given a five-day deadline, 66% of the students completed the survey and claimed their rewards. When given no deadline, only 25% ever collected their money.

Because identities are central to the way people make decisions, any change effort that violates someone's identity is likely doomed to failure. (That's why it's so clumsy when people instinctively reach for "incentives" to change other people's behavior.)