Rewards are directly proportional to the suspect and his peers' status in society: $100,000 was offered in the Moxley case. It meant nothing to millionaires.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
People are pretty simple: they do what they are rewarded for doing. If they get multimillion-dollar bonuses by taking huge risks with other people's money - as they still do - then they will continue to take those huge risks, and not give it another thought.
Millionaires are risk-takers, and they don't become millionaires until they're 40 or 50. It's a slower process than a lot of people think.
In return, society rewards those who give it what it wants. That is why how much money people have earned is a rough measure of how much they gave society what it wanted.
The individual incentive not to commit crime on Wall Street now is almost zero.
People who do crime do it for reward. But you end up in jail - that's no reward. Through crime, your ambitions are low.
Too little attention is paid to the dark side of incentives. They are anything but a magic bullet. Psychologists have known this for years, but it seems largely hidden from the world of commerce.
Despite the generous rewards that state juries dole out, in many cases, victims receive less than 50 cents on the dollar in settlements with the lawyers taking the rest. This is not justice.
Incentive prizes work.
On one of my last days at school, the headmaster said I would either end up in prison or become a millionaire. That was quite a startling prediction, but in some respects, he was right on both counts!
Evidence of defendants' lavish lifestyles is often used to provide a motive for fraud. Jurors sometimes wonder why an executive making tens of millions of dollars would cheat to make even more. Evidence of habitual gluttony helps provide the answer.