Categories
Incentives can be classified according to the different ways in which they motivate agents to take a particular course of action. One common and useful taxonomy divides incentives into four broad classes:
| Class | Definition |
|---|---|
| Remunerative incentives | are said to exist where an agent can expect some form of material reward — especially money — in exchange for acting in a particular way. |
| financial incentives | |
| Moral incentives | are said to exist where a particular choice is widely regarded as the right thing to do, or as particularly admirable, or where the failure to act in a certain way is condemned as indecent. A person acting on a moral incentive can expect a sense of self-esteem, and approval or even admiration from his community; a person acting against a moral incentive can expect a sense of guilt, and condemnation or even ostracism from the community. |
| Coercive incentives | are said to exist where a person can expect that the failure to act in a particular way will result in physical force being used against them (or their loved ones) by others in the community — for example, by inflicting pain in punishment, or by imprisonment, or by confiscating or destroying their possessions. |
| Natural Incentives | such as curiosity, mental or physical exercise, admiration, fear, anger, pain, joy, or the pursuit of truth, or the control over things in the world or people or oneself. |
(There is another common usage in which incentive is contrasted with coercion, as when economic moralists contrast incentive-driven work—such as entrepreneurship, employment, or volunteering motivated by remunerative, moral, or personal incentives—with coerced work—such as slavery or serfdom, where work is motivated by the threat or use of violence, pain and/or deprivation. In this usage, the category of "coercive incentives" is excluded. For the purposes of this article, however, "incentive" is used in the broader sense defined above.)
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Famous quotes containing the word categories:
“Kitsch ... is one of the major categories of the modern object. Knick-knacks, rustic odds-and-ends, souvenirs, lampshades, and African masks: the kitsch-object is collectively this whole plethora of “trashy,” sham or faked objects, this whole museum of junk which proliferates everywhere.... Kitsch is the equivalent to the “cliché” in discourse.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.”
—Gerald M. Edelman (b. 1928)
“All cultural change reduces itself to a difference of categories. All revolutions, whether in the sciences or world history, occur merely because spirit has changed its categories in order to understand and examine what belongs to it, in order to possess and grasp itself in a truer, deeper, more intimate and unified manner.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)