How to Get Your Kid to Do Chores
There’s a new iPad app for parents to incentivize children to do chores. HighScore House! sets up a market for parents and children to assign points to chores and exchange those points for rewards.
Co-founder Kyle Seaman tells us that they’ve tracked 150,000 tasks from about 6,000 users in their beta version (full version will launch in a couple months).
HighScore House! shared some data with us: 43 percent of their users are kids between 5 and 9 years old, with an average task completion rate of 54 percent. Girls have a 2 percent higher completion rate than boys. In general, kids seem to favor low-hanging fruit: lower value tasks (usually easier ones) have a higher completion rate. Read More »
The Unintended Consequences of a Twitter Contest
The other day, we woke up to realize that we were about hit our 400,000th follower on Twitter. So we put out the following tweet, offering some swag.
Innocent enough, no?
But we had walked right into an incentive trap. Read More »
How to Get Doctors to Wash Their Hands, Visual Edition
In our latest podcast “What Do Hand-Washing and Financial Illiteracy Have in Common?,” we revisited a topic we wrote about a few years back: how one hospital (Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles) has tried to increase the rate of hand hygiene among its doctors. In the podcast, chief medical officer Michael Langberg regretfully reported that his doctors, like many doctors, routinely failed to wash their hands. Cedars-Sinai came up with a series of computer screensavers and posters that, along with some other creative measures, significantly jacked up the hand-hygiene rate. Read More »
What Makes Chuck Skinny?
Weight Watchers has ads in heavy rotation with Charles Barkley saying: “lose weight like a man.”
You can also hear him mention his success in his Saturday Night Live monologue.
Something is working. Since starting WW, he’s lost 38 pounds. But what about the Weight Watchers program that has him shedding so much weight?
Is it the group weigh-ins?
Is it the famous Weight Watchers point system?
Or is it something else? Read More »
When It Pays to Say “I Don’t Know”
In response to our recent podcast called “Why Is ‘I Don’t Know’ So Hard to Say?,” a reader named Timothy McCollough writes in with a most interesting story. He teaches at a private international school in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. His courses include two sections of AP microeconomics, sociology, and “regular economics.” Because it’s a private school, he adds, “we have freer reign to set up classroom incentives and engage students as we see fit.” For instance:
Read More »In my classroom, students lose 1/4 point for wrong answers on quizzes. But for writing “I don’t know,” they get 1/4 point. (A correct answer is 1 point). The rationale is that if someone is in a medical emergency, and someone asks me what should be done, the answer “I don’t know” is much preferable to a guess. “I don’t know” leads the questioner to ask someone who hopefully is knowledgeable.
“Football Freakonomics”: Incentives
Today’s question on “Football Freakonomics” is a tricky one. Which incentive is stronger for an NFL player: landing a big contract or winning the Super Bowl?
It can be devilishly hard to find out what truly motivates people to do what they do. There are a lot of reasons for this. Different people have different preferences; an incentive that works for a while may wear off over time; and it’s dangerous to rely on what people say about their motivation, since most of us are concerned about saying “the right thing.”
It’s better, therefore, to measure actual behavior – in this case, for instance, how players perform before and after signing a big contract. Read More »
What to Do With Cheating Students?
I’m nearly certain that a pair of students cheated on my final exam—the probability they had so many identical answers on the multiple-choice exam is infinitesimal. If I pursue them, it takes me time, and there’s no assurance they will be found guilty. If I don’t, I’ll feel badly about giving them an undeserved grade. Even for fairly risk-averse students, cheating seems like a good idea. I doubt that most cheating is caught; and unless the penalty is very severe (expulsion) and/or the students’ costs of contesting the accusation are high, and both are very well-publicized, the incentive to cheat for students with weak consciences seems overpowering. To salve my own conscience I’ll report them, although it’s probably a waste of my time; but I doubt that reporting them will deter their future cheating or deter others very much.
We Are Shocked — Shocked! — to Learn that College Football Coaches Exhibit a Conflict of Interest When Rating Teams
File under “Not Surprising But Still Interesting.” A new working paper by Matthew Kotchen and Matthew Potoski makes these claims:
Read More »Using individual coach ballots between 2005 and 2010, we find that coaches distort their rankings to reflect their own team’s reputation and financial interests. On average, coaches rank teams from their own athletic conference nearly a full position more favorably and boost their own team’s ranking more than two full positions. Coaches also rank teams they defeated more favorably, thereby making their own team look better. When it comes to ranking teams contending for one of the high-profile Bowl Championship Series (BCS) games, coaches favor those teams that generate higher financial payoffs for their own team. Reflecting the structure of payoff disbursements, coaches from non-BCS conferences band together, while those from BCS conferences more narrowly favor teams in their own conference. Among all coaches an additional payoff between $3.3 and $5 million induces a more favorable ranking of one position. Moreover, for each increase in a contending team’s payoff equal to 10 percent of a coach’s football budget, coaches respond with more favorable rankings of half a position, and this effect is more than twice as large when coaches rank teams outside the top 10.
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