Thesis (doctoral)--Göteborg University, 2007. / Added t.p. with thesis statement inserted. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--Brigham Young University. Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 2005. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 135-138).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1970. / eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record.

This study examines the impact of a bus driver attendance incentive program implemented in a rural Mississippi school district with the aim of improving bus driver attendance rates. There is a shortage of bus drivers across Mississippi which has made bus driver attendance paramount. Bus driver absenteeism causes disruptions in student transportation services and affects overall school operations. To address this problem, a rural Mississippi school district introduced a bus driver attendance incentive program that provided financial incentives for bus drivers who maintained perfect attendance rates each month. The research methodology involved collecting and analyzing attendance data for bus drivers over a period of 2 academic years: 1 year prior to the COVID-19 Pandemic and before the implementation of the incentive program and the other 1 year after the introduction of the incentive plan. Although the findings did not reveal a significant positive impact on bus driver attendance between the 2 years in the study, the data did show a number of drivers benefited from the incentive program.

The constitution stipulates that it is required to establish public health institutions. Among all the public health institutions, public hospital, such as municipal hospital or hospital under Department of Health, Executive Yuan, is mostly closely associated with public health. However, comparing the salaries with other healthcare personnel working in the private sector, it is difficult to attract the top physicians into public hospitals. In order to keep the salaries in public and private sectors in balance, or at least minimize the gap, Department of Health Administration initiated the financial incentive program. There are four municipal hospitals in Kaohsiung City: Kaohsiung Municipal United Hospital, Kaohsiung Kai-Suan Psychiatric Hospital, Kaohsiung Municipal Min-Sheng Hospital and Kaohsiung Municipal Chinese Medical Hospital. Since these four hospitals make distinct profits, the amount of financial incentives the staff received are different. Municipal Hospital pays financial incentives in accordance with the laws and rules passed by the direct authority which is Department of Health, Kaohsiung City Government. In this article, we analyze Kaohsiung Municipal Hospital financial incentive program to discuss the content, defect, suggestions and opinions of the staff, real financial incentive fraud cases, applicable law analysis, and whether or not the program conforms to our current concept of administrative law. This article is divided into seven chapters: prologue, introduction of Kaohsiung Municipal Hospital financial incentive program, real fraud cases, analysis on financial incentive program survey, elaborate on the applicable laws, the financial incentive program and the administrative law concept, conclusion and suggestions. It is hoped to bring up some concrete ideas for improvement, to clarify the applicable laws, to reflect the actual opinions and suggestions of the staff toward financial incentive program, and eventually to perfect the program so it is legitimate under both constitution and laws.

This is a review of recent literature on best practices for implementing inclusionary zoning. Existing policies for creating affordable housing in the United States are briefly discussed. Common components of inclusionary zoning ordinances are then detailed, and legal and economic considerations are explained. Finally, the success of inclusionary zoning, its application to large cities, and expert policy recommendations are addressed, before concluding.

Industries across world use different methods to secure the quality of the contract deliverables. These deliverables are carefully defined in an agreement between project owner and agent (buyer and seller) however, there are several reasons that the quality of the outcome does not fulfill the desired pre-agreed quality. In aerospace as well as power & energy industries, the delivered products (outcome of the contracts) should endure a long lifespan. Although guarantee and warrantees are being used in contracts to secure the quality of the outcome for a short period of time after delivery, in several cases, the quality of the delivered product fails right after guarantee expiration date. Therefore, guarantee and warrantee are not considered to be a preventive means while the requirement for such preventive tool is undeniable. This case study gathers data from aerospace as well as power and energy industries on how these two industries shape up their agreements and what sort of incentives they use and if these applied incentives have assisted them to reach the target. These data will be analyzed in comparison to similar conducted research in this field.

Incentives are fundamental and often powerful motivators of human behavior. Considerable research has focused on financial rewards as a tool to encourage “good” decisions. This dissertation examines the psychology and efficacy of monetary incentives—compared to multiple nonmonetary incentives—with respect to individuals’ choices, performance, and habits. I document and explore a variety of interrelated effects that cash, relative to noncash, incentives can incur in four major areas of behavior: habit formation, choice (specifically, tradeoffs involving risk and delay), goal setting, and integrity. In three longitudinal field experiments, I devise and empirically test a novel incentive program based on self-reward, where individuals defined and administered their own rewards for reaching a goal. I find that this system outperforms cash on several consequential metrics, including task engagement and longer-term persistence. I further place these behaviors in the context of a greater focus on compensation when incentivized with cash: People become fixated on attaining the reward over the process of expending effort. Although this mentality fuels efficient goal attainment, it can also lead to—as I show using a series of online studies—distortionary effects on other aspects of goal pursuit, such as the tendency to choose easier effort streams and the willingness to forgo a reward’s magnitude for its certainty or immediacy. Combined, these findings suggest that practitioners seeking to motivate their constituents may do well to reconsider the use of cash incentives.

I hypothesize and find that the variation in corporate tax avoidance is jointly determined by firms’ incentive and opportunities to avoid taxes. Specifically, the positive relation between financial constraints (my proxy for an incentive to avoid taxes) and tax avoidance is significantly stronger for firms with high tax planning opportunities (TPO), where TPO is the distance between a firm’s actual and predicted ETRs. I further show that firms with TPOs based on high permanent (temporary) book-tax differences exhibit more permanent (temporary) book-tax differences under financial constraints. From a risk perspective, I find no evidence that financially constrained firms with low TPO exhibit more tax risk but some evidence that those with high TPO do so. In general, the findings in this paper provide evidence consistent with an incentive-opportunity interaction story to help explain differences in corporate tax avoidance.

This dissertation is thus aiming to create a (1) view on current and historical theoretical and practical approaches of organization economics, (2) to assess their assumptions and implications and explain their contradictions in relation to individual base of the knowledge and motivation. (4) It suggests a framework that might give an economic and theoretical rationale to various managerial measures related to the true ("effective") effort of an individual in a firm that is (5) finally tested in empirical research. For the reasons mentioned above, the overview of often divergent methodological approaches is of a key importance, therefore much attention is dedicated to their description and analysis in the first part of the thesis. It is followed by the introduction of a new framework used in the analysis of various managerial measures applied in the firm, and finally, the hypotheses which test certain assumptions of the framework on empirical data. The "effective effort, cooperation and rivalry framework" is the main output of this thesis, as it explains the roots and influence of direct and indirect managerial measures through the behavior of workers (rivalry, cooperation, rent-seeking) on company's performance. The framework combines three existing independent approaches analyzing the link between managerial measures and company's performance without denying any of the predecessors, and it also brings a new interpretation of the functions of managerial decisions in the firm and the link on material resources. The framework attempts to answer the following research question: Which factors and in a what way influence the effective effort of an individual in the firm? Can this approach be formalized and tested on empirical data? Answering this question would be beneficial for both managers and academia as it would facilitate them to undertake that managerial measures, that would lead to an improvement of firm's long term performance and avoid those actions, which would work contradictory. The empirical analysis focuses on efficiency of several types of incentives and trainings in the medium-sized company on the lowest level of hierarchy (furthermore there is the lack of similar analyses dedicated to an enterprise in Central and Eastern Europe or in such chronological extent in a single firm anywhere in Europe). The extensive data is provided by a leading Czech (mostly retail) betting company operating in a legislatively stable environment not exposed to the currency fluctuations and economic cycle with oligopolistic characteristics. Other industries (besides retail) would hardly provide such high quality data for such a long period suitable for the chosen analysis of the revenues' influence of various managerial measures (training of sale staff, introduction of an upside component of wage, nonmonetary rewards) applied to workers. The results of the empirical analysis show the possible positive effect of increased wage variability on the employee's performance, although the effect of training and nonmonetary rewards was proven as insignificant. These results (positive/negative effect or significance/insignificance) for a low skilled workforce being able to effectively affect the quality of the output (as is the Fortuna case) are in line with the Effective effort, cooperation and rivalry framework.