Search results for "Incentive"
showing 10 items of 297 documents
How to pay for the war in times of imperfect commitment. Adam Smith and David Ricardo on the Sinking Fund
2014
AbstractThe paper proposes a comparative analysis of Smith's and Ricardo's views on the sinking fund. It shows that Smith and Ricardo agreed in stressing the ineffectiveness of the sinking fund as a policy instrument targeted at public debt repayment and tax-burden relief, pointing out that its actual workings had paradoxically helped to increase rather than reduce British total debt-load. Moreover, their explanation of the sinking fund paradox integrates a defective fiscal commitment technology with powerful politicians’ incentives to siphon off the money stored in the sinking fund to meet sudden increases of public expenditure whenever the occasion arose.
Incentive and Selection Effects of Medigap Insurance on Inpatient Care
2012
The Medicare program, which provides insurance coverage to the elderly in the United States, does not protect them fully against high out-of-pocket costs. For this reason private supplementary insurance, named Medigap, has been available to cover Medicare gaps. This paper studies how Medigap affects the utilization of inpatient care, separating the incentive and selection effects of supplementary insurance. For this purpose, we use two alternative estimation methods: a standard recursive bivariate probit and a discrete multivariate finite mixture model. We find that estimated incentive effects are modest and quite similar across models. On the other hand, there seems to be very significant …
Performance variability, impulsivity errors and the impact of incentives as gender-independent endophenotypes for ADHD
2010
Background:Attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is one of the most common and highly heritable child psychiatric disorders. There is strong evidence that children with ADHD show slower and more variable responses in tasks such as Go/Nogo tapping aspects of executive functions like sustained attention and response control which may be modulated by motivational factors and/or state-regulation processes. The aim of this study was (1) to determine if these executive functions may constitute an endophenotype for ADHD; (2) to investigate for the first time whether known modulators of these executive functions may also be familial; and (3) to explore whether gender has an impact on thes…
Micro-level economic factors and incentives in children's energy balance related behaviours: Findings from the ENERGY European cross-section question…
2012
Published version of an article from the journal: International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity. Also available from BMC: http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/1479-5868-9-136 Open Access Background To date, most research on obesogenic environments facing school children has focused on physical and socio-cultural environments. The role of economic factors has been investigated to a much lesser extent. Our objective was to explore the association of micro-level economic factors and incentives with sports activities and intake of soft drinks and fruit juice in 10-12 year-old school children across Europe, and to explore price sensitivity in children’s soft drink consumption and corr…
"Finding my own motivation" - A Mixed Methods Study of Exercise and Behaviour Change Support During Oncological Treatment
2019
AbstractBackgroundExercising during oncological treatment is beneficial but challenging for persons with cancer and may require strategies to increase motivation. Behaviour change support, including specific behaviour change techniques (BCTs), have been used to facilitate exercise in persons undergoing oncological treatment, but more detailed knowledge from an individual perspective is needed to inform clinical practice. The aims were to explore the motivational experiences of exercise combined with behaviour change support, and to describe how specific BCTs were valued among persons exercising during oncological treatment.MethodsA mixed-methods study was conducted using semi-structured int…
Selective dopaminergic lesions of the ventral tegmental area impair preference for sucrose but not for male sexual pheromones in female mice
2006
The role of the meso-accumbens dopaminergic pathway in reward-related behaviours is the subject of intense investigation. In this regard, here we analyse the effects of specific lesions of dopaminergic cells of the ventral tegmental area (VTA) of female mice on two goal-directed behaviours, namely sucrose preference (intake of sucrose solution vs. water) and preference for male sexual pheromones (exploration of male-soiled vs. clean bedding). The results indicate that partial lesions of the VTA that impair neither locomotion nor general exploratory behaviour reduce the preference for sucrose (over a 48-h period) but do not alter the innate attraction that females display for male sexual phe…
Challenge Accepted! a Critical Reflection on How to Perform a Health Survey Among University Students—An Example of the Healthy Campus Mainz Project
2021
Background: Universities represent an important setting of everyday life for health promotion. The Healthy Campus Mainz project aims to develop an evidence-based and comprehensive student health management program covering physical, mental, and social health promotion. Hence, an initial health survey was performed in order to identify the students' health concerns and resources. Up until now, it remains unclear which topics to choose in a health survey among university students and which strategies can be recommended to receive an acceptable response rate or representative student sample within a university setting. The present paper contributes to the call for the present research topic “P…
Allocating cost reducing investments over competing divisions
2007
This paper examines a three-stage model of divisionalization where, first, two parent firms create independent units, second, the parent firms allocate cost reduction levels over these units, and third, the resulting units compete in a Cournot market given their current costs of production. The introduction of the cost reduction phase is shown to reduce the incentives toward divisionalization severely, relative to other existing models. Namely, the scope for divisionalization in equilibrium reduces as the marginal cost of the cost reducing investment decreases, and eventually vanishes. A second-best welfare analysis shows that, for any given market structure, the equilibrium investment deci…
Drastic innovation reduces firms’ incentives to create divisions
2020
I study a game in which two firms create independent divisions, then they choose whether to do R&D so as to reduce their divisions’ marginal costs, and then the divisions compete in the market. I provide necessary and sufficient conditions under which the game has an equilibrium in pure strategies, and I show that the game has an equilibrium only if each firm threatens that if the rival creates more divisions it will use R&D to foreclose the market. The case we find in the literature, in which firms flood the market with their divisions, should happen only in industries with low returns to R&D.
R&D Reduces Firms' Incentives to Create Divisions
2017
I study a game in which two firms create independent divisions, then they choosewhether to do R&D so as to reduce their divisions' marginal costs, and then the divisions compete in the market. I provide necessary and sufficient conditions under which the game has an equilibrium in pure strategies, and I show that the game has an equilibrium only if each firm threatens that if the rival creates more divisions it will use R&D to foreclose the market. The case we find the literature, in which firms flood the market with their divisions, should happen only in industries with low returns to R&D.