Social rewards

The association of inputs with housing values (which accrue to the homeowner as well as the neighborhood more generally), suggests some obvious instrumental motivations not only for chemical application but for the positive association between such practices and community values. As most realtors will tell you, lawn upkeep is a relatively inexpensive investment for maintaining property values. In follow-up discussions, some lawn owners explicitly told us that their lawn care inputs were investments in their homes. Indeed, people with higher incomes and expensive homes have much more capital-in the form of an existing manicured lawn-to protect with chemical applications. Despite any expectation of social reward for environmentally protective behavior, homeowners are actually rewarded for environmentally detrimental behavior. 

It follows then, that predominant libertarian values are deeply entrenched in the notion of the self-made person and that social rewards should only accrue if they are deserved and earned. The role of government is, therefore, limited to those functions that absolutely do not abridge the rights of the individual to exert his or her own will for what he or she believes to be best. Moreover, government s role would be limited to those functions and needs for which individuals could not provide (national defense, negotiation of treaties, etc.). 

To ensure the sustained use of the learned work practices, it is important to motivate workers through the use of incentives. There are many types of incentives, including money, tokens, privileges, social rewards, recognition, feedback, participation, and any other factors that motivate employees, such as enriched job tasks. Positive incentives should be used to develop consistent work practice patterns. 

The Power of Reinforcement Positive feedback tends to reinforce safe behavior. This feedback should be confirming, or socially rewarding, between coaches and coworkers. Sarkus notes that confirming feedback should be immediate, frequent, and favorable to be most effective (2001, p. 32). Sarkus recommends consistently confirming in favor of correcting to help coworkers become more committed to safety and less fixated on mere compliance. 

In sum, individual creativity is a function of antecedent conditions [e.g., past reinforcement history, biographical variables), cognitive style and ability (e.g., divergent thinking, ideational fluency), personality factors [e.g., self-esteem, locus of control), relevant knov/ledge, motivation, social influences [e.g., social facilitation, social rewards), and contextual influences (e.g., physical environment, task and time constraints)."... 

Roy, D. (1953), Work satisfaction and social reward in quota achievement an analysis of piecework incentive , American Sociological Review, vol. 18, pp. 507-14. 

Economic evaluation is an assessment of the probable benefit or reward of a proposed course of action, relative to other choices. Although the benefit usually takes the form of a financial return, in environmental management, transportation (qv), health care, and other social areas, the benefit may be a social gain instead. Some method is then developed to translate the social gain into a monetary equivalent. The discussion herein is limited to the financial return expected from some type of production or service activity. 

Abused drugs generally produce pleasant effects that are desired by the user. However, while most individuals will experience these pleasant effects, not everyone abuses these drugs, and not everyone who abuses them becomes dependent on them. Why some persons abuse drugs while most people do not is a complex area of research. It appears that genetic, environmental, and cultural factors may all interact to predispose some individuals to substance abuse and subsequent dependence. The initial hedonic experiences secondary to use of drugs appear to be primarily due to their ability to activate the primary reward circuits in the brain. These same reward circuits operate under normal circumstances to reinforce certain activities that promote survival, such as food, social affiliation, or sexual activity. 

Fone, K.C., Beckett, S.R., Topham, I.A., Swettenham, J., Ball, M., and Maddocks, L., Long-term changes in social interaction and reward following repeated MDMA administration to adolescent rats without accompanying serotonergic neurotoxicity, Psychopharmacology (Berlin) 159(4), 437 144, 2002. 

A formal comparison between a system of grants or rewards and that of patents was presented recently by Shavell and Ypersele.22 In their article they present a review of the two systems and the theoretical positions of each of them. They state that under the system of grants, insofar as there would be no welfare loss as a result of monopoly prices, the only deviation from optimal allocation would be in relation to the incentive to invest in research. This incentive can be ambivalent. If the social or aggregate surplus is greater than the reward or grant there will be insufficient incentives, and vice versa. Either of these two possibilities may occur, as the optimal reward is equal to the expected surplus under different demand curves. 

A straightforward comparison between the two systems would show first of all the superiority of the grant system, as the welfare loss due to monopoly prices is diluted. However, the incentives to carry out research are imperfect in both systems, although in a different way. In the patent system they are always inadequate because the monopoly benefits are less than the social surplus. In the grant system, the incentives to invest are not systematically inadequate, as they are related to the reward received rather than to the real surplus. 

Opioids have been shown to increase the release of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens but they also subserve reinforcement in animals by a non-dopaminergic mechanism (Di Chiara 8c North,1992 Koob, 1992). Physiologically the opioid system appears to be largely involved in the con-sumatory rewards of feeding, drinking, sexual and maternal behaviour (Koob, 1992 Di Chiara 8c North, 1992) and certain types of social behaviour (Panksepp, 1981 Bolles 8c Fanselow, 1982). 

First, then, consider the way that financing is raised for this mechanism. Essentially, Transferable Intellectual Property Rights offer a way of providing an off-the-books financial reward to companies that develop some socially desirable innovation, such as a vaccine for HIV/AIDS. Ignoring the effect on innovation for the moment, consider how this financial reward is obtained. The innovator is rewarded with a wildcard patent extension of, say, two years... 

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