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In this research, the authors propose that incidental exposure to price promotions can cause downstream impatience in an unrelated domain. Specifically, price promotions trigger reward seeking—a general motivational state—and reward seeking, in turn, yields impatience. Seven experiments (N = 1,795) demonstrate how incidental exposure to price promotions can cause greater willingness to pay to avoid waiting (Experiments 1a and 1b), shorter actual wait times (Experiments 2, 3b, and 5), greater propensity to break a rule to save time (Experiment 3a), and greater discounting in a consequential intertemporal choice (Experiment 4). Consistent with this account, the effect is both more pronounced for people with greater reward sensitivity (Experiments 3a and 3b) and mediated by reward seeking (Experiment 4). Finally, a conceptual replication in a field setting underscores the external validity and managerial relevance of the findings (Experiment 5). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Viewing dialogue management as a reinforcement learning task enables a system to learn to act optimally by maximising a reward function. This reward function is designed to induce the system behaviour required for the target application and for goal-oriented applications, this usually means fulfilling the user’s goal as efficiently as possible. However, in real-world spoken dialogue system applications, the reward is hard to measure because the user’s goal is frequently known only to the user. Of course, the system can ask the user if the goal has been satisfied but this can be intrusive. Furthermore, in practice, the accuracy of the user’s response has been found to be highly variable. This paper presents two approaches to tackling this problem. Firstly, a recurrent neural network is utilised as a task success predictor which is pre-trained from off-line data to estimate task success during subsequent on-line dialogue policy learning. Secondly, an on-line learning framework is described whereby a dialogue policy is jointly trained alongside a reward function modelled as a Gaussian process with active learning. This Gaussian process operates on a fixed dimension embedding which encodes each varying length dialogue. This dialogue embedding is generated in both a supervised and unsupervised fashion using different variants of a recurrent neural network. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of both off-line and on-line methods. These methods enable practical on-line training of dialogue policies in real-world applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is a conceptual and theoretical literature review of articles and works that are relevant to reward allocation in public sector organizations. The paper reviews literature on organizations nature and characteristics; unfairness and fairness in reward allocation and notable theories of reward allocation. The paper reveals some of the unfairness in reward allocations to employees in public organizations and the unfairness of the factors in the performance appraisal used for reward allocation to employees in the public sector as: religious affiliation; ethnicity; corruption; intimidation/threat by superior officers; sexual harassment of female employees by superior officers; political pressure; God-fatherism and Federal Character Principle (FCP). The paper recommends that (1) States and Federal Government should address the unfairness and close the wide gap across hierarchical levels in their reward allocation to employees. (2) The Federal Government should increase its supervision on the States' Governor in order to prevent them from their present inhuman practices of diverting to elections campaigns and their personal use, civil servants and teachers' salaries and allowances that are statutorily allocated to them from the federation accounts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - To determine the role of status information conveyance in a negative reward allocation setting. Methodology - Using previously published experimental data, we test the relative effects of status information conveyed by expressive and indicative status cues on the allocation of a negative reward. Further, we construct an alternative graph theoretic model of expectation advantage which is also tested to determine its model fit relative to the classic model of Reward Expectations Theory. Findings - Results provide strong support for the conclusion that status information conveyed by expressive status cues influences reward allocations more than information conveyed by indicative cues. We also find evidence that our alternative graph theoretic model of expectation advantage improves model fit. Originality - This research is the first to test the relative impact of expressive versus indicative status cues on the allocation of negative rewards and shows that status characteristics can have differential impacts on these allocations contingent on how characteristics are conveyed. Furthermore, the research suggests a graph theoretic model that allows for this differentiation based on information conveyance and provides empirical support for its structure in a negative reward allocation environment. Research limitations - Future research is required to validate the results in positive reward situations. Social implications - The results show that an individual's expectations are altered by varying the manner in which status information is presented, thereby influencing the construction and maintenance of status hierarchies and the inequalities those structures generate. Thus, this research has implications for any group or evaluative task where status processes are relevant [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a powerful and well-studied Machine Learning paradigm, where an agent learns to improve its performance in an environment by maximising a reward signal. In multi-objective Reinforcement Learning (MORL) the reward signal is a vector, where each component represents the performance on a different objective. Reward shaping is a well-established family of techniques that have been successfully used to improve the performance and learning speed of RL agents in single-objective problems. The basic premise of reward shaping is to add an additional shaping reward to the reward naturally received from the environment, to incorporate domain knowledge and guide an agent’s exploration. Potential-Based Reward Shaping (PBRS) is a specific form of reward shaping that offers additional guarantees. In this paper, we extend the theoretical guarantees of PBRS to MORL problems. Specifically, we provide theoretical proof that PBRS does not alter the true Pareto front in both single- and multi-agent MORL. We also contribute the first published empirical studies of the effect of PBRS in single- and multi-agent MORL problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate monetary reward allocation decision-making in an Arab-Islamic business environment.Design/methodology/approach In this mixed-method (quantitative/qualitative) study, data were obtained from a sample of 342 practicing managers of different genders and educational levels working in different industries at different organizational levels in Oman.Findings The more individualistic personal orientation, the more likely the decision makers are to allocate the biggest reward to the best performer and to believe that the equity principle is best for distributing rewards. In the context of a society transitioning from collectivistic to individualistic cultural values, the level of education is associated with preference for the equity principle in reward allocations.Research limitations/implications The reported findings advance the theoretical understanding of how an emic perspective can explain reward allocation decision-making in Arab-Islamic environment.Practical implications Practical implications of this study lie in the guidance that global managers can draw regarding which allocation principle to use in which cultural context: the principle of equity – not equality, need or seniority – is embraced by organizations in the Arabian Gulf.Originality/value The study examines reward allocation decision-making behavior in the under-researched context of the Arabian Gulf and adds to the body of knowledge based on data obtained from practicing managers rather than college students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectives: Risky behaviour seriously impacts the life of adult patients with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Such behaviours have often been attributed to their exaggerated reward seeking, but dysfunctional anticipation of negative outcomes might also play a role.Methods: The present study compared adult patients with ADHD (n = 28) with matched healthy controls (n = 28) during anticipation of monetary losses versus gains while undergoing functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and skin conductance recording.Results: Skin conductance was higher during anticipation of losses compared to gains in both groups. Affective ratings of predictive cues did not differ between groups. ADHD patients showed increased activity in bilateral amygdalae, left anterior insula (region of interest analysis) and left temporal pole (whole brain analysis) compared to healthy controls during loss versus gain anticipation. In the ADHD group higher insula and temporal pole activations went along with more negative affective ratings.Conclusions: Neural correlates of loss anticipation are not blunted but rather increased in ADHD, possibly due to a life history of repeated failures and the respective environmental sanctions. Behavioural adaptations to such losses, however, might differentiate them from controls: future research should study whether negative affect might drive more risk seeking than risk avoidance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, we present a novel clustering-based resource allocation framework for downlink transmission in ultra-dense small cell networks. Specifically, we first model a combinatorial optimisation problem that jointly considers subchannel and power allocation and user traffic demand in terms of a large-scale network scenario. Unfortunately, the huge communication overhead and computational complexity make it challenging for traditional centralised/distributed solutions. To address this issue, we propose an interference-separation clustering-based scheme to divide the massive small cells into smaller groups with different priorities, which reduces the network scale. Different from the existing cluster construction scheme, the proposed clustering method effectively avoids the inter-cluster interference through coordination. Then, for a given cluster configuration, we formulate the distributed resource allocation problem as a local interaction game where the utility of each player comprises not only its own profits but also the interests of neighbours. We prove the existence of Nash equilibrium for the formulated game and design a hierarchical learning algorithm to achieve the Nash equilibrium, which only needs local information exchange. Finally, simulation results validate that the proposed solution outperforms some other existing approaches and is more suitable for large-scale networks. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Customer referral programs (CRPs) are widely applied as an effective means to stimulate word-of-mouth. While previous research mainly focuses on CRPs' impact of acquiring new customers, this study introduces referral programs as a strategic brand management tool. In doing so, this article emphasizes what has been largely neglected by scholars: A 'recommenders-perspective.' Guided by two competing theoretical perspectives, this article proposes that the perceived congruity between a reward and the recommended brand is an essential driver of referral program performance outcomes. The results show that rewards that conform to the image of the recommended brand yield more favorable reward attractiveness perceptions. Furthermore, the authors show that reward attractiveness perceptions inevitably affect the brand customers are asked to recommend in exchange for receiving this reward. The research reported here extends the literature on judgmental evaluations resulting from schema-based processing and provides novel insights into the design of CRPs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose - Prior research suggests that cultural values affect individuals' preferences in whether work rewards (i.e. pay and benefits) are allocated according to rules based on equity, equality, or need. However, this research has focussed primarily on societal-level values or individual-level operationalizations of values originally conceptualized at the societal level. Drawing on equity and social exchange theories, the purpose of this paper is to present a theoretical model and nine propositions that incorporate both individual and societal values as determinants of these reward allocation rule preferences. Design/methodology/approach - The author briefly reviews of the relevant literature on values and reward allocation preferences and present arguments supported by prior research, leading to a model and nine propositions. Findings - The author proposes that societal values and individual values have main and interactive effects on reward allocation preferences and that the effects of societal values are partially mediated by individual values. Research limitations/implications - The model and propositions present relationships that could be tested in future multi-level studies. Future conceptual/theoretical work may also build on the model presented in this paper. Practical implications - The proposed relationships, if supported, would have important implications for organizational reward systems and staffing. Originality/value - Prior research on reward allocation preferences focusses mostly on the effects of societal or individual values. This theoretical paper attempts to clarify and distinguish values at these two levels and to better understand their main and interactive effects on individual reward allocation rule preferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social tags take an important role in exploratory search. In collaborative tagging systems, users are allowed to annotate resources with tags. The significant challenges in such systems are the uncertainty of tag quality and the incomplete annotation on a large number of resources. Based on the observation that these problems can be statistically negligible after receiving sufficient tags, we propose a novel incentive mechanism to reward taggers according to the quality of their bookmarks, called the Quality-based dynamic Incentive Mechanism ( QIM). To well evaluate the quality of bookmarks, we design some quantitative evaluation methods. The reward allocation function is proposed to allocate the budget to different taggers based on their bookmark quality and the tagging states of annotated resources. We perform experiments to evaluate our method on three public datasets collected from real tagging systems. Comparing with previous works, the adopted principle of ' high quality deserves high price' in this paper can encourage users to annotate seriously. The experimental results show that our method gets higher tagging quality of resources under a fixed budget. Moreover, it requires less time and less money to achieve the stable tagging state of a system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to evaluate how perceived career channels and career anchors are related to objective internal career success, and how subjective career success mediates the effects of objective success on employer satisfaction. Design/methodology/approach – Data were collected using questionnaires, and hypotheses were tested on a sample of 800 engineers and managers. Of the sample, 35 percent were female and 67 percent worked in the private sector. Findings – The findings show that the more respondents perceive that performance carries weight in promotion decisions, the higher their level of objective career success. In contrast, the importance placed on relations with the hierarchy has no significant influence. Respondents with a strong management anchor report greater objective career success, and those with a strong life style anchor report lesser objective career success, but greater success in life outside work. Finally, the findings indicate that job success is associated with greater satisfaction with employer, whereas life success is related to lesser satisfaction. Research limitations/implications – This study is based on a sample taken from one profession (engineers), in a specific cultural context. The cross-sectional research design precludes the inference of some causality conclusions. Practical implications – Organizations may benefit from disseminating promotion attribution criteria and reducing perceptions of favoritism in reward allocation. In addition, this study shows that not only individuals but also the employer can benefit from greater positive interdependence between career success and life success. Originality/value – This study represents the first comprehensive attempt to examine the role of perceived career channels and career anchors in objective and subjective career success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We investigated reward-allocation judgments when positive outcomes (monetary rewards) were distributed and the allocator was not a co-recipient, in a sample of 200 Romanian students. Within a full factorial survey design, seven factors, selected to affect the allocation decision, were orthogonally varied. The factors reflect individual characteristics of the recipients (gender, age, contribution, need, work experience) and situational characteristics (future work interaction and task routineness). Romanian students preferred to allocate rewards applying an equitybased distribution model. Work experience and task routineness were also significant, yet less important. The recipient gender has no effect on allocation judgments. In terms of between-respondents variability, we found that students' gender, work experience, and age do not have an impact on reward-allocation judgments. We discuss implications of our findings for organizations and practitioners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explored the effects of the equality and equity principles of reward allocation on future work partner choices. For this purpose, the member who performed either the best or the worst in a three-person group was asked to rate the degree to which she would prefer to work with each of the two other group members in the near future; one of the two others offered to divide the earned scores equally while the remaining group member suggested allocating the scores equitably. The results indicated that the participants preferred the person who had made an offer which was to their advantage. As a future workmate, best performers preferred the one who proposed to allocate proportionately while the worst performers chose the one who offered to distribute evenhandedly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]