Delicious LiveJournal Links for 2-27-2010

[andrewducker]

• How one woman can cause economic boom or bust - and why a change in employment of 0.1% is meaningless
  (tags: statistics jobs analysis economy)
• Average intelligence predicts atheism rates across 137 nations
  (tags: religion intelligence atheism)
• Lake Agassiz - the giant prehistoric lake
  Why had I never heard of this?
  (tags: geography history map)
• Why bonuses and performance pay are a bad idea
  I'd link directly to the FT article, but I've had my total allocation of articles for the month.
  (tags: reward business finance)
• The Traceability of an Anonymous Online Comment (very, very high)
  (tags: privacy anonymity freespeech internet surveillance)
• BBC to re-create the sinking of Atlantis a la 300
  (tags: atlantis history bbc)
• Apparently Dr Who is kinky...
  (tags: DrWho EpicFail)
• Air stewardess revealed as part time porn star, keeps job. Huzzah!
  (tags: porn feminism liberty)
• Demonstrating web security - and just how easy it is to hack many systems.
  (tags: security database hacking sql sqlinjection)
• January Was Hottest Ever
  (tags: weather climate climatechange)
• "Mad Libs" Style Form is filled in up to 40% more often than normal webform.
  (tags: forms usability ui webdesign design web)
• How the normalising of homosexuality affected one person's Valentine's Day
  (tags: cute valentines_day homosexuality society)

Comments

[xquiq.livejournal.com]

Poorly designed incentive systems don't work & they are incredibly difficult to get right.

What do organisations do with this knowledge, however? Taking a basic sales role in financial services, the base is likely to be relatively low. If an orgnisation removes the incentives (which may be substantial), do they then increase the base pay & by how much? How much will someone (who is probably fairly risk-seeking) be willing to sacrifice potential reward for certainty?

I'd be interested to understand what the media & the public would think about large increases to base salaries. I suspect the longer term incentives & clawback systems might be more acceptable all round.