John Markoff's Use Of Incentives

The main point made by the author, John Markoff, is that people are more likely to do something when they are given an incentive, or gift. Markoff expressed, through the help of others, that if there was a problem that needed to be fixed, giving an incentive to a person would help fix the problem because the person would mostly likely start doing whatever needed to be done to help out with the problem. Markoff supports his main point about incentives being a good thing by giving examples of what sophisticated people performed in order to see if incentives would work in different situations. One example Markoff uses to back up his claim was a situation that dealt with using incentives to help out with a traffic jam problem at a college. The …show more content…
In specific, Markoff explains tasks Dr. Balaji Prabhakar has done over the years to show that incentives work. Dr. Prabhakar is a professor of computer science at Stanford University. Dr. Prabhakar is coming with an electronic system that uses incentives to reward people for parking farther away, and traveling at “off-peak times”. The research Dr. Prabhakar seems to be conducted correctly, but in order to improve the data, Dr. Prabhakar could have done an experiment where a task was asked with a reward and then without a reward to see if incentives do really make a change. The research was done well because the results of people performing a certain driving/parking task resulted in low traffic problems. Like I said above, Markoff could have showed a control group instead of just an experimental group. Markoff’s argument was pretty strong, but in order to make it stronger he could have provided more examples on how incentives actually cause a person to perform a certain behavior. Without the control group, the readers of Markoff’s article do not know if people would perform the same tasks without