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:
“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)
“Of course I’m a black writer.... I’m not just a black writer, but categories like black writer, woman writer and Latin American writer aren’t marginal anymore. We have to acknowledge that the thing we call “literature” is more pluralistic now, just as society ought to be. The melting pot never worked. We ought to be able to accept on equal terms everybody from the Hassidim to Walter Lippmann, from the Rastafarians to Ralph Bunche.”
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“all the categories which we employ to describe conscious mental acts, such as ideas, purposes, resolutions, and so on, can be applied to ... these latent states.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)