The intention of this study was to measure the work engagement and EVP of employees and further to investigate the relationship between work engagement and EVP. A secondary objective was to determine to determine to what extend intrinsic rewards of EVP affects work engagement more than extrinsic rewards. The study was quantitative in nature and data was obtained by means of an electronic survey. The EVP questionnaire and UWES were used to measure EVP and work engagement respectively. Results showed that there is no practical relationship between work engagement and EVP; however, evidence suggested a statistically significant relationship between work engagement and EVP. There was no evidence to suggest that in the relationship between work engagement and EVP, intrinsic components of EVP affect work engagement more than extrinsic rewards. It was however suggested that although the extrinsic rewards component of EVP are important in attracting and retaining employees, rewards had no correlation with work engagement. Implications of the findings suggest that rewards might be important when attracting and retaining employees to a company. However, in order to develop levels of work engagement rewards play no significant role. Companies should invest in enhancing the intrinsic components of their EVP to such an extent that it contributes to levels of work engagement.

Machine learning developments have contributed to overcome a wide range of issues, including robotic motion, autonomous navigation, and natural language processing. Of note are the advancements of reinforcement learning in the area of object goal navigation — the task of autonomously traveling to target objects with minimal a priori knowledge of the environment. Given the sparse placement of goals in unknown scenes, exploration is essential for reaching remote objects of interest that are not immediately visible to autonomous agents. Sparse rewards are a crucial problem in reinforcement learning that arises in object goal navigation, as positive rewards are only attained when targets are found at the end of an agent’s trajectory. As such, this work explores object goal navigation and the challenges it presents, along with the relevant reinforcement learning techniques applied to the task. An ablation study of the baseline approach for the RoboTHOR 2021 object goal navigation challenge is presented and used to guide the development of an on-policy agent that is computationally less expensive and obtains greater success in unseen environments. Then, original object goal navigation reward schemes that aggregate episodic and long-term novelty bonuses are proposed, and obtain success rates comparable to the respective object goal navigation benchmark at a fraction of training interactions with the environment.

Thesis (MTech (Busines Administration))--Cape Technikon, 1999. / The purpose of this research is to answer the following fundamental question: "Is the performance bonus approach a viable alternative methodology for implementing a Performance Management and Development intervention in South African companies? " The intention is to use the performance bonus as an entry vehicle for the establishment of a fully functional performance management and development system. The introduction of a performance based bonus system is intended to instill the recognition of "the pay for performance" concept as opposed to one of entitlement. What is expected is that a culture of performance will develop encompassing standards of work performance, goal orientation and a level of individual responsibility for recognition and reward. Understanding and acceptance of the performance bonus will create a platform for the introduction of further levels of remuneration, being increases and finally basic salary becoming performance based. Furthermore, this will allow the development of the further necessary levels of a fully functional integrated performance management and development system. This would entail the inclusion of management levels within the system as well as operational levels (departments, divisions and regions) and finally the organisational level thereby linking all aspects of the system to overall strategy.

This thesis deals with applications of multi-criteria evaluation of alternatives for creating a benefit system for employees. My work consists of a theoretical part, which describes methods suitable for these purposes. It is a method based on utility function and a method based on the minimum distance from the ideal alternative. The second part describes a complete evaluation process used to evaluate employees who work in accounting and tax consultancy and calculation of their deserved benefits base on the evaluations. In the application the criteria for evaluation of employees, weights of individual criteria were specified and I also counted the amount of utilities for each employee and distances from the ideal employee. The calculation of utilities and distances from the ideal employee were aggregated on the basis of summarizing values for individual companies according to the employees. Profit share of each employee was calculated as the sum of utilities and distances from ideal variant, which was related to work performance for the previous year.

<p>Prior studies argue that the board and management of a firm should maximize shareholder value. Also, there is evidence that compensation levels are linked to firm performance as well as monitoring, in other words, the composition of the board influence compensation.</p><p>We document no correlation between CEO compensation and firm performance for a sample of Swedish companies listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange (SSE) over the sample period 1999 to 2008. However, the Industry firms might pay the CEO for performance. Also, stock ownership influence compensation levels; when the five largest shareholders increase their holdings, CEO compensation levels decrease. We interpret this finding as that monitoring is important and the agency costs can be reduced by higher holdings by institutional investors.</p>

The papers of stock-based employee compensation have increased dramatically in recent years, focusing attention on whether stock-based employee compensation can enhance employees¡¦ motivation or impact firm value. A number of recent papers have addressed conflicting evidence as to whether stock-based employee compensation enhance the performance of the firm. Some relatively new studies used use the Ohlson (1995,1999) and Feltham ¡® Ohlson (1999) models to investigate the market¡¦s perception of the economic effect of employee stock options on firm value(Aboody et al.2001; Bell et al., 2002). However, critics have questioned the validity of such studies (For a review of related studies, see Beaver 2002). In fact, stock-based employee compensation can influence firm value through improving performance of firm, and at the same time by diluting the shares of outstanding stocks, thus harms shareholder equity. This study was primarily designed to examine how stock-based employee compensation affects shareholder equity through Incentive and dilute effects. Stock-based employee compensation in this study comprises employee stock bonuses and employee stock options. First, the Incentive and dilute effects are combined in Ohlson model. The hypothesized relationships of constructs, observed variables and operational definitions are defined. The empirical work will be conducted by LISREL method to estimate the coefficients in the model. The estimated results will be dressed the following points. 1.Whether the stock-based employee compensation affects equity valuation. 2.Whether the stock-based employee compensation affects that the intrinsic value through improving abnormal earning? 3.Whether the stock-based employee compensation harms shareholder equity by diluting the shares of outstanding stocks? 4.Discuss employee stock bonuses and employee stock options respectively. In this study, we find the stock-based employee compensation is relevant to the equity value. Employee stock bonuses are relevant to shareholder equity and abnormal earning. In other words, employee stock bonuses have directly incentive effects. Otherwise, employee stock bonuses also have dilute effects. However, the dilute effects are smaller than the incentive effects. On the other hand, employee stock options aren¡¦t relevant to shareholder equity and abnormal earning. Otherwise, employee stock options don¡¦t have direct dilute effects in grant year.

Prior studies argue that the board and management of a firm should maximize shareholder value. Also, there is evidence that compensation levels are linked to firm performance as well as monitoring, in other words, the composition of the board influence compensation. We document no correlation between CEO compensation and firm performance for a sample of Swedish companies listed on the Stockholm Stock Exchange (SSE) over the sample period 1999 to 2008. However, the Industry firms might pay the CEO for performance. Also, stock ownership influence compensation levels; when the five largest shareholders increase their holdings, CEO compensation levels decrease. We interpret this finding as that monitoring is important and the agency costs can be reduced by higher holdings by institutional investors.

In the last decade South Africa saw the introduction of s 8C into the Income Tax Act, no.58 of 1962, the introduction of IFRS 2 into the International Financial Reporting Standards and the promulgation of the 2008 Companies Act. Each of these changes is relevant to and impact on the consequences flowing from executive share incentive schemes, from the perspective of both the employer company offering the scheme and the employee participating in the scheme. The aim of this study was to analyse, from the employer company’s perspective, the implications of each discipline in isolation, as well as the interrelationship of the three disciplines. The further aims of this study were to utilise the findings from the analyses to identify where legislative amendment is required to close loopholes or ensure equitable results, to identify where the interrelationship of the three disciplines result in unintended consequences, and to provide recommendations on how to avoid these adverse consequences. The most significant findings of this study are summarised below. Due to the legal precedent created by the Supreme Court of Appeal in the Labat case, the mode of settlement – cash or equity – will be the determining factor as regards the availability of an income tax deduction in the hands of the employer company. It is submitted that legislative amendment is required to rectify this inequitable result. Where payment by the employer pursuant to a share appreciation rights scheme occurs in a year of assessment subsequent to the year of assessment in which vesting occurred, changes in the value of the underlying equity instrument from the vesting date to the payment date could result in adverse income tax consequences to the employer and/or the fiscus. To address this, it is recommended that the Income Tax Act should be amended to expressly bring cash-settled executive share incentive schemes within the scope of s 7B and to align the provisions of s 7B and 8C in order to avoid anomalies existing between these two sections in so far as the income tax consequences in the hands of the participating employees are concerned.

El siguiente trabajo de investigación, se centra en la indagación y proyección de los efectos que traen las estrategias de trade marketing en el canal tradicional minorista del distrito de Villa el Salvador, específicamente en relación a la liquidez y a los efectos económicos que las mismas pueden traer a las bodegas de este distrito limeño. En primer término, se puede encontrar una definición de los aspectos más importantes del trade marketing, así como su división según sus objetivos de rentabilidad y publicitarios. Tras ello, podrá identificarse las estrategias más importantes a trabajar e investigar, las cuales se resumen a descuentos sobre precio de compra, bonificaciones de productos y rebates sobre el total de costo de abastecimiento. Finalmente, tras esta definición se procede a presentar los hallazgos dentro del campo de investigación por medio de encuestas y entevistas a profundidad a los mencionados puntos de venta. Dichos hallazgos, se contrastan con opiniones de renombrados expertos consultados en la materia; los cuales podrán orientar de forma impecable las aplicaciones de tendencias de Trade Marketing dentro del mercado tradicional peruano / The following investigation, focuses in finding and projecting the effects brought by the main strategies behind the Trade Marketing applications in the retail channel located in Villa El Salvador, district of the city of Lima. This strategies are meant to be applied in the buying process of the small retail shops located in the area, and the effects that they may bring in relation to economics. In first term, we can find the definition of the most important aspects of trade marketing, as well as their division in two clear aspects according to the main objectives of the market: Cost effectiveness and advertisement applications in the point of sales. After this, we will be able to find the most relevant strategies in order to investigate their application in the field, such as direct discounts, product bonuses and rebates over the total amount of buying. Finally, after this description and definition, the field investigation interviews and survey results are presented, the ones that will be contrasted with the opinions given by specialists in the field / Trabajo de investigación

The purpose of this thesis was to test the theory of wage incentives, as presented in the literature, to determine if the theory is sound when applied to work situations. Data were collected by means of a survey of manufacturing plants within the state of Virginia. Questionnaires were sent to a randomly selected sample of 294 plants from among the 20 manufacturing industry classifications. It was determined that in those manufacturing plants in which wage incentive plans are applicable, they result in increased earnings for hourly workers, increased productivity of these workers, and decreased unit labor costs. It was further determined that unionism has no apparent effect on the use of these plans. / M.S.