Economists usually assume that monetary incentives improve performance, and psychologists claim that the opposite may happen. We present and discuss a set of experiments designed to test these contrasting claims. We found that the effect of monetary compensation on performance was not monotonic. In the treatments in which money was offered, a larger amount yielded a higher performance. However, offering money did not always produce an improvement: subjects who were offered monetary incentives performed more poorly than those who were offered no compensation. Several possible interpretations of the results are discussed. I.

. It is argued that the acceptance of knowledge in a community depends on several, approximately independent selection "criteria". The objective criteria are distinctiveness, invariance and controllability, the subjective ones are individual utility, coherence, simplicity and novelty, and the intersubjective ones are publicity, expressivity, formality, collective utility, conformity and authority. Science demarcates itself from other forms of knowledge by explicitly controlling for the objective criteria. KEYWORDS: evolutionary epistemology, selection criteria, knowledge, science Introduction It is with great pleasure that I use this opportunity to comment on Donald T. Campbell's last paper (1997). I came into contact with Don's work in 1984, during a conference on evolutionary epistemology at the University of Ghent. Since then, his writings have been a constant source of inspiration. After we met, in 1990, we started to regularly exchange publications. Each time I received a ...

The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of Scott MacKenzie in the preparation of this manuscript and financial support provided by the Prudential Financial Services, Northwestern

An increasing number of conventional retailers are acquiring e-commerce capabilities in addition to their physical outlets to compete with purely online retailers. It is thus of interest to retailers how trust is transferred from the offline channel to the online channel. This study adopts the social capital theory to examine the factors that influence online trust in multichannel retailers at the before-interaction stage. We survey 247 actual customers of a supermarket who have not interacted with the supermarket’s Web site. This paper posits that online trust is affected by offline trust, perceived online reputation of the retailer in providing products online, and perceived assurance. Surprisingly, customers are found to be more influenced by their perceptions of the retailer’s online reputation in providing products online than their offline trust in the retailer before they interact with the retailer’s Web site. Perceived assurance is found to play a peripheral role in determining online trust.