PURPOSE The biggest challenge for corporate wellness initiatives is low rates of employee participation. We test whether a behavioral economic approach to incentive design (i.e., a lottery) is more effective than a direct economic payment of equivalent monetary value (i.e., a grocery gift certificate) in encouraging employees to complete health risk assessments (HRAs). DESIGN Employees were a...

Playing the state lottery is clearly inconsistent with expected value maximization; lotteries only return approximately 50 cents on the dollar, on average. Moreover, low-income individuals spend a higher percentage of their income, and possibly even a higher absolute amount, on lottery tickets than do wealthier individuals. However, little research has explored what factors encourage or discour...

Ransomware is a growing threat to individuals and enterprises alike, constituting major factor in cyber insurance the security planning of every organization. Although game theoretic lens often frames as competition between equals -- profit maximizing attacker loss minimizing defender reality many situations that ransomware organizations are not playing non-cooperative game, they lottery. The w...

BACKGROUND Although rates of sustained virologic response (SVR) after hepatitis C virus (HCV) treatment with direct-acting antivirals (DAAs) surpass 90% in trials and some more "real world" settings, some patients, such as those with substance use disorders, will be challenged to adhere to HCV care. METHODS To assess the feasibility of 2 strategies for financially incentivizing adherence to H...

In a recent article, Douven and Williamson offer both (i) a rebuttal of various recent suggested sufficient conditions for rational acceptability and (ii) an alleged ‘generalization’ of this rebuttal, which, they claim, tells against a much broader class of potential suggestions. However, not only is the result mentioned in (ii) not a generalization of the findings referred to in (i), but in co...

Human decision making under risk and uncertainty may depend on individual involvement in the outcome-generating process. Expected utility theory is silent on this issue. Prospect theory in its current form offers little, if any, prediction of how or why involvement in a process should matter, although it may offer ex post interpretations of empirical findings. Well-known findings in psychology ...

Although the concept of utility is fundamental to many economic theories, up to now a generally accepted method determining a subject’s utility function is not available. We investigated two methods that are used in economic sciences for describing utility functions by using response-locked event-related potentials in order to assess their neural underpinnings. For defining the certainty equiva...