Quotes About Incentives

self-determination theory." Many theories of behavior pivot around a particular human tendency: We're keen responders to positive and negative reinforcements, or zippy calculators of our self-interest, or lumpy duffel bags of psychosexual conflicts.

ultimately, open source depends on intrinsic motivation with the same ferocity that older business models rely on extrinsic motivation

People use rewards expecting to gain the benefit of increasing another person's motivation and behavior, but in so doing, they often incur the unintentional and hidden cost of undermining that person's intrinsic motivation toward the activity."4

The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table. But once we've cleared the table, carrots and sticks can achieve precisely the opposite of their intended aims.

Careful consideration of reward effects reported in 128 experiments lead to the conclusion that tangible rewards tend to have a substantially negative effect on intrinsic motivation

To be clear, it wasn't necessarily the rewards themselves that dampened the children's interest. Remember: When children didn't expect a reward, receiving one had little impact on their intrinsic motivation. Only contingent rewards—if you do this, then you'll get that—had the negative effect.

Indeed, the very premise of extrinsic incentives is that we'll always respond rationally to them. But even most economists don't believe that anymore. Sometimes these motivators work. Often they don't. And many times, they inflict collateral damage. In short, the new way economists think about what we do is hard to reconcile with Motivation 2.0.

Do rewards motivate people? Absolutely. They motivate people to get rewards.

When used in these situations, "if-then" rewards usually do more harm than good. By neglecting the ingredients of genuine motivation—autonomy, mastery, and purpose—they limit what each of us can achieve.

When money is used as an external reward for some activity, the subjects lose intrinsic interest for the activity," he wrote.5 Rewards can deliver a short-term boost—just as a jolt of caffeine can keep you cranking for a few more hours. But the effect wears off—and, worse, can reduce a person's longer-term motivation to continue the project.

Substantial evidence demonstrates that in addition to motivating constructive effort, goal setting can induce unethical behavior.

Type I behavior: A way of thinking and an approach to life built around intrinsic, rather than extrinsic, motivators. It is powered by our innate need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.   Type X behavior: Behavior that is fueled more by extrinsic desires than intrinsic ones and that concerns itself less with the inherent satisfaction of an activity and more with the external rewards to which that activity leads.

Likewise, several studies show that paying people to exercise, stop smoking, or take their medicines produces terrific results at first—but the healthy behavior disappears once the incentives are removed.

Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus. That's helpful when there's a clear path to a solution. They help us stare ahead and race faster. But "if-then" motivators are terrible for challenges like the candle problem. As this experiment shows, the rewards narrowed people's focus and blinkered the wide view that might have allowed them to see new uses for old objects.

In order to attract and retain new businesses in rural and economically depressed regions of Virginia, we need to provide competitive incentives to entrepreneurs and business owners.

I have started or run several companies and spent time with dozens of entrepreneurs over the years. Virtually none of them, in my experience, made meaningful personnel or resource-allocation decisions based on incentives or policies.

When you rely on incentives, you undermine virtues. Then when you discover that you actually need people who want to do the right thing, those people don't exist because you've crushed anyone's desire to do the right thing with all these incentives.

All rational action is economic. All economic activity is rational action. All rational action is in the first place individual action. Only the individual thinks. Only the individual reasons. Only the individual acts.

Within a world of free trade and democracy there are no incentives for war and conquest. In such a world it is of no concern whether a nation's sovereignty stretches over a larger or a smaller territory. Its citizens cannot derive any advantage from the annexation of a province. Its territorial problems can be treated without bias and passion; it is not painful to be fair to other people's claims for self-determination.

One must rather ask how much could be produced if competition among producers were abolished.

Mises showed that the end of private property would mean the end to economic rationality.

Any business or industry that pays equal rewards to its goof-offs and its eager-beavers sooner or later will find itself with more goof-offs than eager-beavers.

The rewards leaders give are counterbalanced by the results that their people give in return.

The desire of businessmen for profits is what drives prices down unless forcibly prevented from engaging in price competition, usually by governmental activity.