Posted by Amy Diduch on May 03, 1999 at 14:42:56:
In Reply to: Incentives: Money, grade points, or sheer fun? posted by Greg Delemeester on December 02, 1996 at 19:28:43:
: I would like to know what, if any, incentives instructors have used to motivate student-subjects in courses which utilize several experiments over the course of a semester. Has anybody used money on a regular basis? How about grade points? If grade points, are they part of the regular course grade calculation or merely bonus points? In addition to these incentives, I've simply relied on the sheer fun from participation (and the general competitiveness of students) to generate salient behavior. The latter, however, has not always been successful. What have others tried?
I gave students in my experimental econ class a very long list of "extra" assignments. Each assignment had a price attached, ranging from $4 to $100. Students were told that they could use their profits to buy their way out of any or all assignments for the course. It looks like most will manage to buy up all the assignments and they seem very motivated to do so.