Harvard Researchers Find A Creative Way To Make Incentives Work

Incentives are all the rage: employee bonus pay, app badges, student grades, and even lunch with President Obama. Despite their widespread use, most research finds that incentives are terrible at improving performance in the long-run on anything but mindless rote tasks, because the fixation on prizes clouds our creative thinking (video explanation below). However, a new Harvard study of teachers found that a novel approach to incentives could dramatically improve student performance: give teachers a reward upfront and threaten to take it away if performance doesn't actually improve. Exploiting the so-called "loss-aversion" tendency could open the door to creative incentivizing for software designers and managers.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/2cAGWlHj68s/

roman holiday belize adele lyrics bruno mars best new artist 2012 grammys foo fighters