We present a novel model capable of distinguishing between the effects of negative incentives (“sticks”) and positive incentives (“carrots”) for influencing the behavior of intelligent and adaptable adversaries. Utilities are developed for the defender and the terrorist. The defender is assumed to have a unit cost of defense, and unit costs of providing negative and positive incentives. The ter...

Agri-environmental programs, such as the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, provide payments to livestock and crop producers to generate broadly defined environmental benefits and to help them comply with federal water quality regulations, such as those that require manure nutrients generated on large animal feeding operations to be spread on cropland at no greater than agronomic rates. ...

In many countries around the world, including Iran, obesity is reaching epidemic proportions. Doctors have recently taken, or expressed support for, an extreme 'personal responsibility for health' policy against obesity: refusing services to obese patients. This policy may initially seem to improve patients' incentives to fight obesity. But turning access to medical services into a benefit depe...

A mechanistic model based on synthesis and inactivation of enzymes, associated to the respiration pathway, was proposed to describe wound-induced respiration of fresh-cut produce. Carrots (Daucus carota L.) were cut into slices, sticks, a combination of both, and shreds to obtain different wounding intensities, defined by the ratio of new area created to tissue weight (A/W). Respiration rates o...

Constructing compensation schemes for effort in multi-dimensional tasks is complex, particularly when some dimensions are not easily observable. When incentive schemes contractually reward workers for easily observed measures, such as quantity produced, the standard model predicts that unrewarded dimensions, such as quality, will be neglected. Yet, there remains mixed empirical evidence in favo...

Companies often provide incentives for employees to maintain healthy lifestyles. These incentives can take the form of either discounted premiums for healthy-weight employees ("carrot" policies) or increased premiums for overweight employees ("stick" policies). In the three studies reported here, we demonstrated that even when stick and carrot policies are formally equivalent, they do not neces...

The son of a Lithuanian artist, Antanas Mockus was the president of the National University in Colombia before he became mayor of Bogotá in 1995. As mayor, he transformed the city into a huge classroom, not only bringing to his administration a new view of governing but also transforming the way people exercised their citizenship. Mockus resorted to a creative communicative and pedagogical effo...