97 Quotes About Incentives

Are people innately altruistic?" is the wrong kind of question to ask. People are people, and they respond to incentives. They can nearly always be manipulated--for good or ill--if only you find the right levers.

The best incentives in the life of a person involved in sales can be offering valuable products and solving end user problems.No bonus can replace that. Remember that.

Without sensuality, a relationship is merely a matter of duty.

A goal without real consequences is wishful thinking. Good follow-through doesn't depend on the right intentions. It depends on the right incentives.

La religion est un moyen efficace de modifier la structure des jeux de ce type. [...] Dieu est peut-être encore plus efficace qu'un gouvernement à cet égard, puisque son omniscience et omnipotence apportent une garantie très forte que les mauvaises actions vaudront des sanctions sévères à leurs auteurs. Dieu est le parrain absolu

Every time we pretend to know something, we are doing the same: protecting our own reputation rather than promoting the collective good. None of us want to look stupid, or at least overmatched, by admitting we don't know an answer.

We still don't have a good word to describe what is missing in Cameroon, indeed in poor countries across the world. But we are starting to understand what it is. Some people call it 'social capital, or maybe 'trust'. Others call it 'the rule of law', or 'institutions'. But these are just labels. The problem is that Cameroon, like other poor countries, is a topsy-turvy world in which it's in most people's interest to take action that directly or indirectly damages everyone else.

The communists operated on the assumption that once capitalism and its attendant economic abuses were eliminated, and once social production was communalized and people were afforded some decent measure of security and prosperity, they would contentedly do their fair share of work. That often proved not so.

As men, we live for sensual incentives. Everything else has to revolve around that.