Helping people make better decisions using optimal gamification

Game elements like points and levels are a popular tool tonudge and engage students and customers. Yet, no theory cantell us which incentive structures work and how to design them.Here we connect the practice of gamification to the theory ofreward shaping in reinforcement learning. We leverage thisconnection to develop a method for designing effective incen-tive structures and delineating when gamification will succeedfrom when it will fail. We evaluate our method in two behav-ioral experiments. The results of the first experiment demon-strate that incentive structures designed by our method helppeople make better, less short-sighted decisions and avoid thepitfalls of less principled approaches. The results of the sec-ond experiment illustrate that such incentive structures can beeffectively implemented using game elements like points andbadges. These results suggest that our method provides a prin-cipled way to leverage gamification to help people make betterdecisions

MatlabTools

These is a general purpose toolbox that the models and simulations rely on

Experiment 2

Experiment2.zip contains all files required to rerun Experiment 2. The landing page of this experiment is consent.html