Abstract Title: Customer Perceived Value of Credit Card Rewards - A study on Canadian Consumers Level: Final assignment for Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration Author: Lisa Smedley Supervisor: Jonas Kågström Date: 2013 - January Aim: The aim of this study is to investigate what influences Customer Perceived Value; where Canadian consumers’ preferences lie in terms of rewards in the Canadian credit card industry. Method: After researching previous studies and determining what constructs have been utilized prior on similar research topics, I implement a quantitative, and to some extend iterative, research approach. Through survey research, I investigate Canadian consumer preferences through a survey sample of 124 Canadian consumers in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Result & Conclusions: One finding in the study indicates that utilitarian benefits, which provide financial gain for the card holder, are perceived by respondents as the most valuable reward. Another finding is that inexperienced credit card holders see significantly greater value in symbolic benefits than experienced card holders do. The present study does not support the theory that customer involvement influences the customer’s perception of rewards. 2 Suggestions for future research: More extensive research is needed on the subject of whether Canadian consumers’ perceived value of rewards is influenced by their level of involvement in their credit card. Also, studies involving additional factors that could possibly determine a consumer’s perception of rewards, such as income and ethnicity should be investigated for a more well-rounded understanding of customer preferences. Contribution of the thesis: The present study contributes with new findings that can be of substantial significance for Canadian financial institutions as it provides insight into what credit card rewards Canadian consumers perceive as being valuable to them. Key words: Rewards programs, credit cards, customer loyalty, perceived customer value, timing of reward, type of reward, dimension of benefit, utilitarian, hedonic, symbolic

Bakgrund och problem: Ett styrmedel företag kan använda för att nå sina mål är belöningssystem. Utformningen av belöningssystemet samt att det tydligt motiverar de anställda är två viktiga aspekter. Tillsammans är belöningssystem samt motivation två välstuderade ämnen inom vissa branscher. För mer monotona arbeten som lagerverksamhet saknas dock detta arbete. Av denna anledning är det av intresse att studera hur lagerpersonal upplever att de motiveras av belöningssystemet.    Syfte: Syftet med studien är att beskriva fallföretagets belöningssystem samt utreda hur de anställda upplever belöningssystemet och huruvida det motiverar dem. Om det empiriska materialet visar på svagheter i belöningssystemet presenteras förslag på förändringar.    Metod: Studien har genomförts i form av en fallstudie på fallföretaget. Flertalet respondenter har intervjuats genom semi-strukturerade intervjuer. För att stärka studiens kvalitet har flertalet teoretiska källor använts.     Slutsats: Fallföretaget har idag uppsatta mål som de anställda arbetar mot samt ett utvecklat belöningssystem. Det som saknas för att belöningssystemet ska vara en motivationsfaktor är kopplingen mellan uppnådda mål och belöningen för detta.Det empiriska resultatet visar att gemenskapen är det som gjort att de anställda stannat kvar på företaget. Gemenskapen och grundlönen är även de största motivationsfaktorerna. / Background: One of the control mechanisms the companies can use to reach their objectives is a reward system. The parts included in the reward system and that it motivates the employees are two important aspects. The two subjects, reward system and motivation, are very well studied for certain branches. For more monotonous works such as warehouse operations, that is not the case. Therefore,it is interesting to study how warehouse employees experience if and in what way they are motivated by the reward system.    Purpose: The purpose of this study is to describe the case company’s reward system but also examine how the employees are experiencing the system and to find out how it motives them. If the empirical data shows that there are weaknesses in the reward system, suggestions for improvements will be given.    Method: The paper has been conducted in a case study form. More than one respondent has been interviewed, by semi-structured interviews. To increase the quality of the study different theoretical sources have been used.    Conclusions: The employees at the case company are working towards achieving objectives conducted by the company and the company has a well-developed reward system. However, what is missing is the connection between the objectives and the reward to make the reward system a factor of motivation. The empirical data shows that the feeling kinship among the employees is the reason why they have stayed at the company. The kinship and the salary is also the most important factors of motivation.

Die steigende Konkurrenz um qualifizierte Mitarbeiter veranlasst Unternehmen die Mitarbeiterbindung zu forcieren, und durch Belohnung und Anerkennung Anreize zu schaffen, um die Fluktuation möglichst gering zu halten. Dieses Paper geht auf Reward and Recognition Systeme als eine mögliche Strategie der Mitarbeiterbindung ein und stellt Schlüsselfaktoren und Handlungsempfehlungen für eine Implementierung in virtuellen Teams dar. Dazu wurde ein Literature Review durchgeführt und die daraus resultierte Datenbasis einer qualitativen Inhaltsanalyse unterzogen. Dabei konnte festgestellt werden, dass virtuelle Teams besondere Herausforderungen wie fehlende räumliche Nähe und eingeschränkte Feedbackmöglichkeiten überwinden müssen, damit Belohnung und Anerkennung nicht auf der Strecke bleiben. Als zentrales Ergebnis der Untersuchung kann festgehalten werden, dass bei der Implementierung von Reward and Recognition Systeme die Individualität und Diversität der Mitarbeiter, der virtuellen Teams und der Organisation beachtet werden sollte.

Evaluating our environment by deciding what is beneficial or harmful, pleasant or punishing is a part of our daily lives. Seeking pleasure and avoiding pain is a common trait all mobile organisms exhibit and understanding how rewarding stimuli are represented in the brain remains a major goal of neuroscience. Studying reward learning in the fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster has enabled us to better understand the complex neural circuit mechanisms involved in reward processing in the brain. By conditioning flies with sugars of differing nutritional properties, we determined that flies trained with sweet but non-nutritive sugars formed robust short-term memory (STM), but not long-term memory (LTM). However, flies conditioned with a sweet and nutritious sugar or a sweet non-nutritious sugar supplemented with a tasteless nutritious compound, formed robust 24 hour LTM. These findings led us to propose a model of parallel reinforcement pathways for appetitive olfactory conditioning in the fly, in which both sweet taste and nutrient value contribute to appetitive long-term memory. We followed this line of research by examining the neural circuitry in the fly brain that represents these parallel reward pathways. We found that the biogenic amine octopamine (OA) only represents the reinforcing effects of sweet taste. Stimulation of OA neurons could replace sugar in olfactory conditioning to form appetitive STM. Surprisingly, implanting memory with OA was dependent on dopamine (DA) signaling, which although being long associated with reward in mammals, was previously linked with punishment in flies. We found that OA-reinforced memory functions through the α-adrenergic OAMB receptor in a novel subset of rewarding DA neurons that innervate the mushroom body (MB). The rewarding population of DA neurons is required for sweet and nutrient reinforced memory suggesting they may integrate both signals to drive appetitive LTM formation. In addition, OA implanted memory requires concurrent modulation of negatively reinforcing DA neurons through the β-adrenergic OCTβ2R receptor. These data provide a new layered reward model in Drosophila in which OA modulates distinct populations of both positive and negative coding DA neurons. Therefore, the reinforcement system in flies is more similar to that of mammals than previously thought.

Remote electrical tilt (RET) optimization involves maximizing the coverage and minimizing interference for antennas in a cellular network. A RET optimization problem typically has many of antennas, each of which has little data. Reinforcement learning (RL) agents have recently been deployed to solve RET optimization problems [1, 2]. These algorithms generally require large amounts of data, and therefore they are not applied for individual antennas but rather for groups of antennas. We show that this leads to degraded performance than agents personalized for individual antennas with extensive data. Furthermore, we design a reward shaping (RS) agent, which augments the reward signal to learn quicker than agents trained only on individual antennas while still retaining their performance. / Remote electrical tilt (RET) optimering innebär att försöka maximera täckningen och minimera störningar för antenner i ett mobilnät. Ett RET-optimeringsproblem har vanligtvis ett stort antal antenner, som var och en har lite data. Reinforcement learning (RL)-agenter har nyligen använts för att lösa RET-optimeringsproblem [1, 2]. Dessa algoritmer kräver i allmänhet stora mängder data och därför används de inte för enskilda antenner utan snarare för grupper av antenner. Vi visar att detta leder till försämrad prestanda jämfört med agenter anpassade för individuella antenner med stora datamängder. Dessutom designar vi en Reward shaping (RS)-agent, som förstärker belöningssignalen för att lära sig snabbare än agenter som bara tränas på individuella antenner samtidigt som deras behåller sin prestanda.

<p dir="ltr">Reinforcement learning (RL), which aims to train an agent to maximize its accumulated reward through time, has attracted much attention in recent years. Mathematically, RL is modeled as a Markov Decision Process, where the agent interacts with the environment step by step. In practice, RL has been applied to autonomous driving, robotics, recommendation systems, and financial management. Although RL has been greatly studied in the literature, most proposed algorithms are model-based, which requires estimating the transition kernel. To this end, we begin to study the sample efficient model-free algorithms under different settings.</p><p dir="ltr">Firstly, we propose a conservative stochastic primal-dual algorithm in the infinite horizon discounted reward setting. The proposed algorithm converts the original problem from policy space to the occupancy measure space, which makes the non-convex problem linear. Then, we advocate the use of a randomized primal-dual approach to achieve O(\eps^-2) sample complexity, which matches the lower bound.</p><p dir="ltr">However, when it comes to the infinite horizon average reward setting, the problem becomes more challenging since the environment interaction never ends and can’t be reset, which makes reward samples not independent anymore. To solve this, we design an epoch-based policy-gradient algorithm. In each epoch, the whole trajectory is divided into multiple sub-trajectories with an interval between each two of them. Such intervals are long enough so that the reward samples are asymptotically independent. By controlling the length of trajectory and intervals, we obtain a good gradient estimator and prove the proposed algorithm achieves O(T^3/4) regret bound.</p>

Algorithmically designed reward functions can influence groups of learning agents toward measurable desired sequential joint behaviours. Influencing learning agents toward desirable behaviours is non-trivial due to the difficulties of assigning credit for global success to the deserving agents and of inducing coordination. Quantifying joint behaviours lets us identify global success by ranking some behaviours as more desirable than others. We propose a real-valued metric for turn-taking, demonstrating how to measure one sequential joint behaviour. We describe how to identify the presence of turn-taking in simulation results and we calculate the quantity of turn-taking that could be observed between independent random agents. We demonstrate our turn-taking metric by reinterpreting previous work on turn-taking in emergent communication and by analysing a recorded human conversation. Given a metric, we can explore the space of reward functions and identify those reward functions that result in global success in groups of learning agents. We describe 'medium access games' as a model for human and machine communication and we present simulation results for an extensive range of reward functions for pairs of Q-learning agents. We use the Nash equilibria of medium access games to develop predictors for determining which reward functions result in turn-taking. Having demonstrated the predictive power of Nash equilibria for turn-taking in medium access games, we focus on synthesis of reward functions for stochastic games that result in arbitrary desirable Nash equilibria. Our method constructs a reward function such that a particular joint behaviour is the unique Nash equilibrium of a stochastic game, provided that such a reward function exists. This method builds on techniques for designing rewards for Markov decision processes and for normal form games. We explain our reward design methods in detail and formally prove that they are correct.

In the following study you will be presented with the research that has been done to investigate how monetary rewards affect motivation and performance. The point of the research was to understand how monetary rewards affected employees motivation and performance. We chose to reach out to four companies within four different industries which all either have or have had monetary reward systems with either bonuses or commissions. To gather all the empirical data needed we chose semistructured interviews with a total of nine respondents. Four of the respondents have or have had monetary rewards and the other five respondents have or have had positions where they are able to affect or have insight in how the reward system works. The purpose of choosing the respondents we did was to get a broader understanding for how the monetary rewards affect employees within different industries so that we could find general conclusions that can be used within other branches and companies. The result of the research shows that monetary rewards increase the level of motivation on employees, but that it does not necessarily mean that it will have a big effect on the performance. We found that monetary rewards does affect performance in the way that it makes the employees extensively will do their best at work, but that the employees still would reach their goals at work without any monetary rewards. We also researched whether group or individually based rewards were more desired and why. Our conclusion was that most people prefer a mix of the two, but that individually based rewards was more preferred than group based. / I följande studie kommer du som läsare att få ta del av den forskning som genomförts för att undersöka finansiella belöningars påverkan på motivation och prestation. Syftet med studien var att kunna förstå hur finansiella belöningar i form av bonus och provision påverkar medarbetare. Vi valde att vända oss till fyra företag inom fyra olika branscher som alla har eller tidigare haft finansiell belöning i form av bonus eller provision. För insamling av empirisk data genomfördes nio semistrukturerade intervjuer. Fyra av respondenterna omfattas eller har omfattats av finansiell belöning och fem av respondenterna besitter positioner som har eller har haft en påverkan och insyn i hur de finansiella belöningssystemen fungerar. Syftet med det breda urvalet av respondenter var att kunna få en bredare uppfattning om hur finansiella belöningar påverkar medarbetare inom olika branscher och genom det kunna dra mer generella slutsater som kan användas även inom andra branscher och företag. Resultatet av studien visar på att finansiella belöningar är motiverande för medarbetare, men att det nödvändigtvis inte behöver ha en större påverkan på prestationen. Vi fann att finansiella belöningar ökar prestationer i den bemärkelsen att medarbetaren blir mer mån om att prestera sitt allra yttersta, men att medarbetarna även utan finansiella belöningar skulle genomföra sitt arbete och för att nå de mål som finns uppsatta. Vi undersökte också om grupp- eller individbaserad belöning föredras och varför. Slutsatsen blev att de flesta föredrar en blandning av grupp- och individbaserad belöning, men att medarbetarna föredrar individbaserad belöning före gruppbaserad.

Monetära belöningssystem är vanligt förekommande inom organisationer och implementeras vanligtvis för att öka motivationen hos medarbetare för att kunna påverka deras prestation, dock kan det finnas andra effekter som det inte tas någon hänsyn till. Syftet med studien är att skapa kunskap och en djupare förståelse om effekter av monetära belöningssystem i arbetslivet och hur monetära belöningssystem påverkar prestationen. Den teoretiska referensramen komponerades av tidigare studier på monetära belöningssystem och olika motivationsteorier, såsom Maslows behovshierarki och Vrooms förväntansteori. För att samla in data har semistrukturerade intervjuer utförts med åtta informanter. Valet av informanter gjordes med vissa kriterier där kriterierna var att informanten skulle arbeta vid en arbetsplats där de hade ett monetärt belöningssystem som antingen baserades på individen eller gruppen prestation eller både individen och gruppen prestation. Studiens resultat visar att uppfattningen av det monetära belöningssystemet påverkas främst av hur trygg personen känner sig ekonomiskt. Det visar att det finns positiva effekter i form av ökad motivation, men att det även finns negativa effekter i form av minskad motivation i vissa fall. Studien visar även att det monetära belöningssystemet i vissa fall även kan bidra till stress, oro, rädsla för att misslyckas och försämrad kvalité i arbetsuppgifter som inte innefattas av det monetära belöningssystemet. I vissa fall visar resultatet även att samarbetet och kommunikationen blir lidande vid användning av ett belöningssystem som är baserat på individens prestation, medan i andra fall så påverkas inte samarbetet och kommunikationen av belöningssystemet som är baserat på individens prestation. Vi har kommit fram till att monetära belöningssystem har både positiva och negativa effekter och påverkar prestationen båda positivt och negativt och att det främst beror på hur ekonomiskt trygg personen känner sig. Organisationer behöver ta hänsyn till detta vid implementeringen av ett monetärt belöningssystem så att belöningssystemet kongruerar med organisationens intresse. / Monetary reward systems are common in organisations and are usually implemented to increase motivation amongst the employed. The goal is to have an impact on the performance, but there may be other effects that are not considered. The purpose of the study is to create knowledge and a deeper understanding of the effects of monetary reward systems in the working life and how monetary reward systems affect the performance. The theoretical frame of reference was composed of previous studies on monetary reward systems and various motivational theories, such as Maslow's hierarchy of needs and Vroom's expectancy theory. In order to collect data, semi-structured interviews have been conducted with eight informants. The selection was based on a few criteria where the criteria were that the informant would work at a workplace where they had a monetary reward system that either was based on the individual or group performances or both the individual and the group performances. The study's results show that the perception of the monetary reward system is affected primarily by how financially secure the person feels. It shows that there are positive effects like increased motivation, but that there are also negative effects in terms of reduced motivation in some cases. The study also shows that in some cases the monetary reward system also contributes to stress, concern, fear of failure and a deterioration in the quality of tasks that are not included in the monetary reward system. In some cases, the result also shows that the cooperation and communication suffer when using a reward system that targets the individual's performance, while in other cases the cooperation and communication of the reward system that is based on the individual's performance is not affected. We have concluded that monetary reward systems have both positive and negative effects and affect both performances positively and negatively and that it depends primarily on how financially secure the person feels. Organizations need to take this into account when implementing a monetary reward system, so that the reward system correspond with the organisation's interest

Reward-related learning occurs when previously neutral stimuli acquires an enhanced ability to elicit approach and other responses. Studies in the past have shown that dopamine receptor-mediated 3’,5’-cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP)-dependent intracellular signalling is important for reward-related learning. Until recently, cAMP-dependent protein kinase (PKA) was the only known signalling molecule that was activated by cAMP. However, it has been discovered that another enzyme, exchange protein directly activated by cAMP (Epac), is also activated by cAMP. Thus, it is possible that cAMP mediates reward-related learning by an Epac-dependent signalling pathway. The present study used a conditioned place preference (CPP) paradigm to investigate whether Epac is involved in the acquisition of reward-related learning. Bilateral injections of amphetamine (20 µg/0.5μl/side) into the nucleus accumbens (NAc) have been shown in previous studies to reliably produce a CPP. Thus, amphetamine (20 µg) and Sp-adenosine 3’,5’-cyclic monophosphorothioate triethylamanine (Sp-cAMPS) (0.1, 1.0, 10, 15, 20 µg), an agent that activates both PKA and Epac, or amphetamine (20 µg) and 8-(4-chlorophenylthio)-2’-O-methyladenosine-3’,5’-cyclic monophosphate (8-pCPT) (0.73, 1.27, 1.45, 2.89, 5.78, 11.56 µg), an agent that selectively activates Epac, were co-injected into NAc to determine their effects on the acquisition of CPP. Results showed that 8-pCPT (1.45 µg), but not lower or higher doses, inhibited CPP. Sp-cAMPS (0.1, 15, 20 µg) also inhibited CPP, replicating the results of previous studies. The results implicate Epac in the acquisition of reward-related learning. / Thesis (Master, Neuroscience Studies) -- Queen's University, 2008-04-25 13:29:37.857