<p>Humans must integrate information to make decisions. This thesis is concerned with studying neural mechanisms of decision making, and combines tools from economics, psychology, and neuroscience. I employ a neuroeconomic approach to understand the processing of reward information and motivation in the brain, utilizing neural data from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to make connections between cognitive neuroscience and economics.</p><p>Chapter 1 lays the groundwork for the thesis and provides background on neuroscience, fMRI, and neuroeconomics. Chapter 2 sketches the central challenges of using neuroscience to address economic questions. The first half of the chapter discusses familiar arguments against the integration of neuroscience and economics: behavioral sufficiency and emergent phenomenon. The second half constructs principles for interdisciplinary research linking mechanistic (neuroscience) data to behavioral (economic) phenomena: mechanistic convergence across experiments and biological plausibility in models.</p><p>Chapters 3 and 4 employ a nonstandard analysis technique, multivariate pattern analysis (MVPA), to identify brain regions that contain information associated with different types of economic valuation. Chapter 3 uses a combinatoric approach to evaluate how brain regions uniquely contribute to the ability to predict different types of valuation (probabilistic or intertemporal). MVPA shows that early valuation phases for these rewards differ in posterior parietal cortex and suggests computational topographies for different rewards. Chapter 4 employs within- and cross-participant MVPA, which rely on potentially different sources of neural variability, to identify brain regions that contain information about monetary rewards (cash) and social rewards (images of faces). Cross-participant analyses reveal systematic changes in predictive power across multiple brain regions, and individual differences in statistical discriminability in ventromedial prefrontal cortex relate to differences in reward preferences. MVPA thus facilitates mapping behavior to both individual-specific functional organization and general organization of the brain across individuals. </p><p>Chapter 5 employs a reward anticipation task to measure variation in relative motivation without observing choices between rewards (money and candy). A reaction-time index captures individual differences in motivation, and heterogeneity in this index maps onto variability in two brain regions: nucleus accumbens and anterior insula. Further, the nucleus accumbens activation mediates the predictive effects of anterior insula. These results show that idiosyncrasies in reward efficacy persist in the absence of a choice environment.</p><p>Chapters 6 and 7 conclude the thesis. Chapter 6 complements discussions of neuroeconomics with text analysis of an exhaustive corpus from top economics journals and references from a large set of review articles. The analysis shows a mismatch between topics of importance to economics and prominent concepts in neuroeconomics. I show how neuroeconomics can grow by employing cognitive neuroscience to identify biologically plausible and generalizable models of a broader class of behaviors.</p> / Dissertation

Family-owned governance is a typical governance structure in Taiwan¡¦s companies, including those ones engaged in high-tech industry. For those family-owned companies in high-tech industry, they need to assign professional managers in key decision-making roles in order to compete in this industry characterize by fast-moving, rapidly changing, and highly competitive. Thus, the mechanism to solve the possible agency problem caused from separation of ownership and management is a rather tough issue for those high-tech family-owned companies. Utilizing the over-five-year data, this study examines the possible relationships between the assignment of professional managers in key decision-making roles, the family sharing, and the performance in Taiwan¡¦s family-owned companies in personal computer industry. The results indicate that assigning professional managers in key decision-making roles will negatively moderate the negative relationship between family indirect sharing and performance. However, the assignment of professional managers in key decision-making roles will not significantly influence the relationship between family direct sharing and performance in high-tech family-owned companies. The finding highlights the importance of giving professional managers decision-making positions to solve the agency problem besides the typical compensation mechanism in family-owned company context. Furthermore, it also provides referable values in agency issues in family businesses.

The purpose of this study is to reveal, through the use of case study methodology, how faculty collaboration may foster the development of intellectual capital and how organizational reward systems mediate this process. Collaboration has been chosen as the unit of analysis due to the collaborative nature of innovation. Innovation often produces a sustainable competitive advantage for organizations. The key in leveraging organizations' innovative capacity is through the development of intellectual capital. Human resource development is a viable method of fostering organizational resources such as intellectual capital. Due to economic, political, and organizational constraints upon traditional human resource development activities, intellectual capital may be best fostered via non-traditional methods. Organizational reward systems, as in the case of performance-based tenure and promotion, have been shown to both promote and hinder collaborative activities. A qualitative case study approach has been chosen due to contextual factors influencing collaboration. Semi-structured interviews, document and archival analysis served as the primary means of data collection. Faculty collaboration occurring at a large Texas university was examined via three main data sources: the college-level strategic plan, network analysis of interdepartmental collaboration, and targeted, semi-structured interviews. Data analysis revealed collaboration at the university often occurs via relationships, networks, and is fostered via resource allocation. Tenure and promotion as well as available resources seem to have a mediating effect on the decisions faculty made relating to research collaborations. Data supported the theoretical variables derived from the Theory of the Learning Organization. Recommendations for fostering collaboration center upon administering rewards in close proximity of collaboration behaviors. Further research must be performed to better understand the outcomes of successful collaboration as well as the different context in which fostering collaboration may be beneficial to organizational outcomes.

Loyalty program, which is to encourage frequent purchasing and to maintain customer long-term relationships, has become a key marketing tool in various industries. The framework of the program is to provide reward incentives based on the cumulative purchases for certain products or services. Researches show that the cost of customer retention is approximately six times lower than that of customer acquisition. Although the importance of such program rises, few researches are made related to the topic. Thus, this study is aimed at exploring the relationships between loyalty effort requirement and reward incentives in order to provide better and more efficient loyalty programs for enterprises. The effects of effort requirement on consumer preferences towards loyalty program rewards are evaluated. In addition, monetary cost acts as moderator is added in to examine the moderating effect. A 2x2 between-subject experimental design with approximately 259 sampling subjects is adopted in the study and the results are analyzed by One-Way ANOVA aided by SPSS software. The results of this study are as follows: (1) Increasing the effort requirement of loyalty programs will increase consumer preference for hedonic rewards rather than utilitarian rewards. The reason for this is that long streams of effort required for loyalty programs may serve as reasons to justify and reduce the guilt for hedonic rewards selections and consumptions. (2) When monetary costs are added to loyalty programs, no matter at low or high effort requirements, consumer preferences for hedonic rewards will decrease and in contract, preferences for utilitarian rewards will increase. (3) When monetary costs are added to loyalty programs, increasing the effort requirement of loyalty programs will not increase consumer preference for hedonic rewards. This may due to the strong monetary costs effect on the sampling subjects that ends up easing the effect of result one. Four marketing implementations for this study could be drawn. First, utilitarian rewards are more appropriate as loyalty program incentives than hedonic rewards. Marketers could provide more utilitarian rewards in loyalty programs as incentives to attract more participants. Second, as loyalty program effort requirement increases, hedonic rewards could be added in the reward mix to attract consumers. Third, loyalty program, which provide rewards by accumulative effort rather than money expenditure, may serve as a justification for hedonic rewards consumption. Thus, hedonic rewards could serve as promotion tool for high effort requirement loyalty programs. Finally, when monetary costs are added to loyalty programs, marketers could weight more utilitarian rewards in reward mix regardless effort requirement levels.

Research of the relation among the job involvement, job satisfaction, reward and job performance for consuming finance staff - Banks in Kaohsiung area to be the examples Abstract Finance service industry is a key pivot in modern economic system. The high service quality in finance is apparently consequent upon the strong competition in financing market day by day. During these recent years, banks struggle to occupy more marketing share in consuming loan. Based on the principles of pursuing high profit and dispersing risks, how to reinforce the quality of manpower, improve job performance and service quality are the most important targets for finance service industry. Therefore, using individual variable, job involvement, job satisfaction as independent variables, reward as interfered variable, and job performance as dependent variable to probe into the relation among the job involvement, job satisfaction, reward and job performance. Furthermore, using reward as interfered variable to investigate the effect of interference to job involvement, job satisfaction on job performance. This reseach was using the method of questionnaire survey together with various kind of statistic analysis and got the important discoveries are stated separately as follows: 1. The different individual variables to job involvement, job satisfaction, reward and job performance comes out a partly remarkable discrepancy. 2. Job involvement, job satisfaction, reward and job performance reveals outstanding positive relation. 3. The effect of interference among inspiration and safety, the equity of reward and internal satisfaction, external satisfaction, general satisfaction to customer satisfaction, job efficiency of job performance concludes as follows¡G (1) The interaction of internal satisfaction, inspiration and safety revelas interference effect to the customers statisfaction. (2) The interaction of external satisfaction, inspiration and safety revelas interference effect to the customers statisfaction. (3) The interaction of internal satisfaction and equity revelas interference effect to the customers statisfaction. (4) The interaction of general satisfaction and equity revelas interference effect to the customers statisfaction. (5) The interaction of internal satisfaction and equity revelas interference effect to the job efficiency . (6) The interaction of external satisfaction and equity revelas interference effect to the job efficiency . According to the results of research, finance organization enable to promote job performance and competition by offering high reward for their staff, increasing job satisfaction of employee, and establishing perfect reward system. Key words : consuming finance, job involvement, job satisfaction, reward, job performance.

<p>Introduction: Competition increases and companies need to adjust their business to stay competitive. Employees have gained an important for an or-ganisation and are often seen as the key to business success. Motiva-tion is important for increased performance. A reward system can, amongst other things, help an organisation to motivate, attract and retain their employees. Historically, rewards have concerned mostly senior management. We where interested in how a reward system could affect people further down in the hierarchy.</p><p>How can a reward system influence motivation in small shop-floor business units?</p><p>What are the benefits and possible pitfalls with a reward system for such a setting?</p><p>Purpose: The purpose of this report is slightly wider than what the research questions suggest. By thoroughly investigating the motivating ele-ments we aim to create a frame of reference, which is thought to give insight into the important components of a reward system and the motivating factors. It is our aim that this frame will be applicable to other settings similar to the one which we will investigate. We also intend to look into what positive and negative aspects there are and how the disadvantages with a reward system can be minimized.</p><p>Method: To fulfil our purpose we have chosen to perform a case study on the service unit of Hedin Göteborg Bil AB. In order to retrieve the necessary empirical data we have interviewed two managers and car-ried out a questionnaire amongst the thirteen service technicians.</p><p>Results: In line with theory, we found that financial rewards it is not the prime source for motivation; there are many factors that play a lar-ger role. Some of the most motivating factors turned out to be col-leges, autonomy and responsibility, fun and rewarding work tasks. More interestingly, we saw a relation between many of these and the reward system, indicating that financial rewards enhance the motiva-tional effects of other factors.</p><p>We found that there are several positive and negative aspects with any reward system. The case study presented solutions to many of the possible pitfalls and indicated that they benefited from their cur-rent reward system.</p>

<p>The brain’s dopaminergic system is critical to adaptive behaviors, and is centrally implicated in various pathologies. For decades, research has aimed at better characterizing what drives the mesolimbic dopamine system and the resulting influence on brain physiology and behavior in both humans and animals. To date, the dominant modes of research have relied on extrinsic approaches: pharmacological manipulations, direct brain stimulation, or delivering behavioral incentives in laboratory tasks. A critical open question concerns whether individuals can modulate activation within this system volitionally. That is, can individuals use self-generated thoughts and imagery to invigorate this system on their own? This process can be referred to as “cognitive neurostimulation” -- a precise and non-invasive stimulation of neural systems via cognitive and behavioral strategies. And if not, can they be taught to do so? Recent technological advances make it feasible to present human participants with information about ongoing neural activations in a fast and spatially precise manner. Such feedback signals might enable individuals to eventually learn to control neural systems via fine-tuning of behavioral strategies. The studies described herein investigate whether individuals can learn to volitionally invigorate activation within the mesolimbic reward network. We demonstrate that under the right training context, individuals can successfully learn to generate cognitive states that elicit and sustain activation in the ventral tegmental area (VTA), the source of dopamine production within the mesolimbic network. Although participants were explicitly trained to increase VTA activation, multiple mesolimbic regions exhibited increased connectivity during and after training. Together, these findings suggest new frameworks for aligning psychological and biological perspectives, and for understanding and harnessing the power of neuromodulatory systems.</p> / Dissertation

Bakgrund: Under flera årtionden har handeln med aktier och värdepapper moderniserats och utvecklats. En investerare kan idag placera en order för att köpa en aktie över hela världen. Investerare letar alltid efter nya aktier att investera för att maximera sin avkastning dock medför detta en risk. Att analysera en investering kan göras på flera olika sätt där Sharpekvoten är en av flera sätt att analysera på. Tidigare har Sharpekvoten oftast använts vid analys av fonder och inte aktier och i tidigare forskning används Sharpkvoten flitigt men flera olika parametrar används då. Syfte: Studiens syfte är att undersöka skillnaderna i portföljer med aktier med låg risk kontra portföljer med aktier med hög risk och se vilken av dessa typer av portföljer som gett bäst avkastning, i förhållande till den risk som tagits. Sharpekvoten kommer att användas som ett nyckeltal för att svara på syftet. Metod: Studien har behandlat aktier på den Svenska, Amerikanska och Japanska marknaden och på dess Large- och Small cap marknader. Utifrån den data som har samlats in har en kvantitativ studie utförts för att sedan analyserats i förhållande med de teorier och studier som har berörts. Studien har även kompletterats med intervjuer för att bredda analysen och tänkanden kring hur investerare agerar vid hög risk aktier. Resultat: Sharpekvoten är högre på den svenska och japanska marknaden på respektive lands large cap samt 1st section. Intervjuerna som gjordes gav svaret att den bästa strategin är att differentiera sin aktieportfölj och att högrisk aktier endast bör utgöra en liten del av portföljen. I analysen framkommer det att sharpekvoten inte kan ge ett entydigt svar på förhållandet avkastning och risk, då det är vår uppfattning att avkastningen påverkas av en mängd andra faktorer.

Addiction is thought to arise, in part, from a maladaptive learning process in which enduring memories of drug-related experiences are formed, resulting in persistent and uncontrollable drug-seeking behavior. However, it is well known that both acute and chronic alcohol (ethanol) exposures impair various types of learning and memory in both humans and animals. Consistent with these observations, both acute and chronic exposures to ethanol suppress synaptic plasticity, the major neural substrate for learning and memory, in multiple brain areas. Therefore, it remains unclear how powerful memories associated with alcohol experience are formed during the development of alcoholism. The mesolimbic dopaminergic system is critically involved in the learning of information related to rewards, including drugs of abuse. Both natural and drug rewards, such as ethanol, cause release of dopamine in the nucleus accumbens and other limbic structures, which is thought to drive learning by enhancing synaptic plasticity. Accumulating evidence indicates that plasticity of glutamatergic transmission onto dopamine neurons may play an important role in the development of addiction. Plasticity of NMDA receptor (NMDAR)-mediated transmission may be of particular interest, as NMDAR activation is necessary for dopamine neuron burst firing and phasic dopamine release in projection areas that occurs in response to rewards or reward-predicting stimuli. NMDAR plasticity may, therefore, drive the learning of stimuli associated with rewards, including drugs of abuse. This dissertation finds that repeated in vivo ethanol exposure induces a metaplasticity of NMDAR-mediated transmission in mesolimbic dopamine neurons, expressed as an increased susceptibility to the induction of NMDAR LTP. Enhancement of NMDAR plasticity results from an increase in the potency of inositol 1,4,5- trisphosphate (IP3) in producing the facilitation of action potential-evoked Ca2+ signals critical for LTP induction. Interestingly, amphetamine exposure produces a similar enhancement of IP3R function, suggesting this neuroadaptation may be a common response to exposure to multiple drugs of abuse. Additionally, ethanol-treated mice display enhanced learning of cues associated with cocaine exposure. These findings suggest that metaplasticity of NMDAR LTP may contribute to the formation of powerful memories related to drug experiences and provide an important insight into the learning component of addiction. / text

Pain is the most common and debilitating sign of a medical problem, with nearly 15 million patients suffering from chronic pain, including neuropathic pain. Widely used therapies for treating neuropathic pain include tri-cyclic antidepressants, opioids, anticonvulsants, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory agents and combinations thereof. Despite the abundance of treatments, the management of chronic pain remains difficult due to an inability for many patients to achieve appropriate pain relief at doses which are tolerable over long periods of time.Opiates (natural products), or opioids (synthetic derivatives), are considered the gold standard of analgesic care, though with little efficacy for neuropathic pain. Opioids are associated with unwanted side effects, including paradoxical pain and abuse liability that may result from several nervous system adaptations within the pain modulating neural network. These dose related side effects become more prevalent as clinicians try to overcome analgesic tolerance.Molecular mechanisms underlying these unwanted side effects have been studied extensively, and the literature purports a variety of contributing factors and neurobiological adaptations. The studies herein describe additional molecular adaptations and novel pharmacological approaches to counteract these changes. First, the contributions of neurobiological remodeling within a single receptor system (the opioid system) were investigated in the spinal dorsal horn after peripheral nerve ligation and chronic exposure to an opioid agonist in combination with an ultra-low-dose of opioid antagonist. The effects of the ultra-low-dose opioid antagonist naltrexone on the efficacy of oxycodone for neuropathic pain were investigated after both central and systemic administration.Secondly, molecular remodeling occurs across different receptor systems in the pain network, including altered regulation of pronociceptive molecules (e.g. substance P; SP). Previous studies have reported that opioid-induced hyperalgesia, tolerance and reward can be prevented by a blockade or ablation of SP activity at the neurokinin 1 receptor (NK1). We have characterized single compounds, rationally designed to act as opioid agonists and an NK1 antagonist using in vitro assays and the efficacy in vivo using rodent models of pain, antinociceptive tolerance and reward. Collectively, these studies validate the concept of targeting multiple neurobiological adaptations as a therapeutic option for neuropathic pain and reducing opioid- mediated side effects.