Incentive Systems at UVA

In their paper, Weingast and Moran state, “The congressional dominance approach assumes that congressmen-or, more specifically, particular congressmen on the relevant committees-possess sufficient rewards and sanctions to create an incentive system for agencies” (768). After discussing the effects of this incentive system in class, I looked for specific instances of incentive systems in the working world. Besides the typical wage system and monetary bonuses that companies typically give out to their employees for good work, I found the topic of this paper especially interesting, which discusses the incentive systems at big corporations. The paper discusses how big companies incentivize their workers with things like free food to produce a variety of effects, including working longer hours, cross-pollination between different departments in the company, and better efficiency in terms of time spent getting and eating food. While these incentives do produce some positive effects for the company, the author, Byrne Hobart, argues that these perks actually discourage outside friends and the creation of families, thus creating a society defined by solitude and over-worked individuals. I found the author’s stance on how the incentive systems placed in big companies could negatively affect the foundations of society to be particularly interesting, and therefore, searched for an example of an incentive system that I believed correctly aligned the organizations motives with the ambitions of today’s society. My roommate is a leading member of Green Greeks here at UVA, which is a club that looks to tackle the problems of sustainability in Greek life. This club has an incentive system in place that works to get Greek organizations to pick up their aluminum cans. They offer an appealing prize to the top three organizations that pick up the most cans. This system rewards people for picking up cans and helps the environment in the process of doing so. Also, Greek organizations have the incentive to participate because of the prize awarded in the end. After implementing this system, the Green Greeks have recycled over 1900lbs of aluminum in just one semester.