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The big carrot: High‐stakes incentives revisited
Author(s) -
BrañasGarza Pablo,
GarcíaMuñoz Teresa,
Neuman Shoshana
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
journal of behavioral decision making
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.136
H-Index - 76
eISSN - 1099-0771
pISSN - 0894-3257
DOI - 10.1002/bdm.657
Subject(s) - incentive , heaven , attendance , church attendance , salient , relation (database) , economics , positive economics , production (economics) , psychology , social psychology , microeconomics , philosophy , theology , law , political science , computer science , economic growth , database , religiosity
Using an international dataset of about 35 000 subjects, this paper provides an empirical example of high‐stakes incentives in relation to religious practice. First, we show that incentives (based on absolute belief) play a salient role in religious performance. Second, we find that when both positive (heaven) and negative (hell) incentives are available the former are more effective than the latter. Specifically, it is shown that beliefs in heaven are much more relevant than beliefs in hell when estimating the production of religious commodities (church‐attendance and praying equations). Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.