Sensible Incentives

Bartik provides a clear and concise overview of how state and local governments employ economic development incentives in order to lure companies to set up shop—and provide new jobs—in needy local labor markets. He shows that many such incentive offers are wasteful and he provides guidance, based on decades of research, on how to improve these programs.

Incentives are the most powerful tools executives can use to improve worker performance. This is particularly true in today's empowered workplace, where incentives can ensure that workers apply their initiative toward company goals. Now, in this groundbreaking book, Richard McKenzie and Dwight Lee show how to select the right incentives and how to use them for best results. Generously illustrated with examples from business, industry, government, academia, and professional sports, this superb volume offers a comprehensive overview of incentives, both in theory and in practice, providing a wealth of ideas managers can use to get employees to work harder, smarter, and more cooperatively. Much of the book is quite eye-opening. For instance, while McKenzie and Lee recognize that money is the prime motivator, they urge managers not to overlook the power of non-monetary incentives, carefully evaluating such motivators as fringe benefits, psychological incentives, education, and training. And they examine a host of other issues, including how to take advantage of executive "overpayment" to increase profits; the limits of piece-rate and other pay-for-performance schemes; finding the right balance between current pay and a more generous pension plan; the value of tough bosses; and hostile takeovers as a form of managerial incentive. How workers are rewarded is often more important than how much they are rewarded, say the authors. The job of good managers is getting the incentives right. Managing Through Incentives shows managers how to apply proven motivators to help any size firm energize the work force, increase its profits, and meet the awesome challenges of today's fiercely competitive global economy.

Incentives are inducements that aim to enhance the value of an offering by increasing its benefits or, more frequently, by reducing its costs. The ultimate goal of incentives is to incite action on the part of the company’s target customers, collaborators, and employees. Because they typically are used to increase sales volume, incentives are often referred to as sales promotions. The key aspects of designing and managing incentives are the focus of this note. The discussion of managing incentives is complemented by an in-depth overview of sampling as a promotional tool and an outline of the game-theory view of sales promotions. This note is an excerpt (Chapter 13) from Strategic Marketing Management: Theory and Practice by Alexander Chernev (Cerebellum Press, 2019).

The legitimate and illegitimate use of incentives in society today Incentives can be found everywhere—in schools, businesses, factories, and government—influencing people's choices about almost everything, from financial decisions and tobacco use to exercise and child rearing. So long as people have a choice, incentives seem innocuous. But Strings Attached demonstrates that when incentives are viewed as a kind of power rather than as a form of exchange, many ethical questions arise: How do incentives affect character and institutional culture? Can incentives be manipulative or exploitative, even if people are free to refuse them? What are the responsibilities of the powerful in using incentives? Ruth Grant shows that, like all other forms of power, incentives can be subject to abuse, and she identifies their legitimate and illegitimate uses. Grant offers a history of the growth of incentives in early twentieth-century America, identifies standards for judging incentives, and examines incentives in four areas—plea bargaining, recruiting medical research subjects, International Monetary Fund loan conditions, and motivating students. In every case, the analysis of incentives in terms of power yields strikingly different and more complex judgments than an analysis that views incentives as trades, in which the desired behavior is freely exchanged for the incentives offered. Challenging the role and function of incentives in a democracy, Strings Attached questions whether the penchant for constant incentivizing undermines active, autonomous citizenship. Readers of this book are sure to view the ethics of incentives in a new light.

Outlines a bold vision of an America prosperously transformed by scientific innovations but threatened by special interest groups, powerful lobbyists, and government bureaucrats determined to prevent or control new technologies.

This volume of essays by one of the world's foremost Kant scholars explores the efforts of the great Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) to construct a moral philosophy based on the premise that the most fundamental value for human beings is their freedom to set their own ends.

When incentives work well, individuals prosper. When incentives are poor, the pursuit of self-interest is self-defeating. This book is wholly devoted to the topical subject of incentives from individual, collective, and institutional standpoints. This third edition is fully updated and expanded, including a new section on the 2007–08 financial crisis and a new chapter on networks as well as specific applications of school placement for students, search engine ad auctions, pollution permits, and more. Using worked examples and lucid general theory in its analysis, and seasoned with references to current and past events, Incentives: Motivation and the Economics of Information examines: the performance of agents hired to carry out specific tasks, from taxi drivers to CEOs; the performance of institutions, from voting schemes to medical panels deciding who gets kidney transplants; a wide range of market transactions, from auctions to labor markets to the entire economy. Suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate students studying incentives as part of courses in microeconomics, economic theory, managerial economics, political economy, and related areas of social science.

Halla Kim explores the leading themes in Kant’s philosophical ethics from a structural-methodological point of view to highlight the activities of reason vis-à-vis the blind forces of brute nature. Basing the study on Kant's short, but monumental, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kim also draws on other major writings by Kant and his critics. Kim shows that philosophical ethics, as Kant conceived it, must capture the gist of the ineluctable, inescapable, and irreducible freedom we strive to exemplify in our practical lives. Viewed this way, the moral law is none other than the law of the will determining itself. It is the law of the self-activity of the will. Contending that the concepts and doctrines in Kant’s ethics should be understood as an ethics of the self-activity of the will, Kim argues that the categorical imperative is the particular way this moral law is addressed to finite rational beings. Kant and the Foundations of Morality provides new perspective on the philosopher's thought to benefit studies of eighteenth-century philosophy, epistemology, modern philosophy, moral theory, moral philosophy, and ethics.