Reward shaping allows reinforcement learning (RL) agents to accelerate learning by receiving additional reward signals. However, these signals can be difficult to design manually, especially for complex RL tasks. We propose a simple and general approach that determines the reward of pre-defined events by their rarity alone. Here events become less rewarding as they are experienced more often, w...

A US national sample of 2947 future teachers, 457 current teachers, and 1219 education faculty members was asked to rate the importance of various suggestions for improving the professional status of teaching. The results indicated that future teachers differed from current teachers and education professors. The results also suggested that all these groups rated increasing extrinsic and intrins...

Crowdsourcing is a method of production and problem solving, in which companies are helped by geographically dispersed people willing to contribute via internet. In this article, the factors that induce the intention of contribution by crowdsourcing participants are analyzed. At first, we proposed a model combining the main motivations presented by the literature with the variables attitude and...

Creativity is a much needed quality in today’s business and therefore an important research area. Whilst implementing and evaluating computer support for electronic brainstorming, it was noticed that the sheer presence of technology does neither guarantee usage nor success. Factors such as organisational culture and attitudes seem to have an equally important role, and this observation called f...

Online retailers employ various strategies, such as reviewer reputation systems and online communities, to encourage consumers to write online product reviews. Monetary incentives---a widely used extrinsic motivation in the business world---are not commonly used by online retailers to encourage consumers to write online product reviews. One plausible explanation is because of the cost of moneta...

Three studies compared beliefs about natural and late blooming positive traits with those acquired through personal effort, extrinsic rewards or medicine. Young children (5-6 years), older children (8-13 years), and adults all showed a strong bias for natural and late blooming traits over acquired traits. All age groups, except 8- to 10-year-olds, treated natural and late-blooming traits as fix...

Content contribution from individuals is critical to the viability of online communities. In this study we identify the factors that are associated with the quantity and the quality of content sharing in a photo sharing community, where the act of content creation is decoupled from the act of content sharing. We draw on theories of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and find that the prospect ...

With the growing popularity of Crowdsourcing (CS), companies are developing different strategies to tap into the creativity of the crowd. Some of these strategies imply the long-term involvement of communities of external individuals. Since participation in CS is voluntary, it is important to understand the determinants of participation. Several studies exist that investigated the motivations o...

This paper introduces a computational model of online collaborative learning system and investigates how the heterogeneity of opportunity cost among users initiates a vicious cycle of accumulation of unnecessary duplicate postings and eventually the system shuts down. Further examination explores how deterring newcomers improves collaborative learning system efficiency by reducing unnecessary d...

Volunteers are a valuable set of human resources for any sporting event, and various studies have been conducted in different contexts to understand volunteers’ psychological characteristics. The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of motivations on individual’s volunteer satisfaction using a modified version of Bang and Chelladurai’s (2003) Volunteer Motivations Scale for Internatio...