 My research question is a negative one. I was surprised how people concentrate on monetary incentives only to make people work. So it's money. The assumption is it's money that drives people. And I would agree that many people think like that, but I was always amazed because most people I know find it much more important to be recognized by other people, to be accepted by other people, to get the attention of other people. And that's not the same as a monetary reward. And so I was thinking what other rewards are there in society? And then I came to the idea that we should look at awards. Symbolic rewards without money. Just having an award given to you and somebody saying it's great what you do, pursue that work. The research approach we used was to first think about the issue. What motivates people? And there are two main motivations. Namely extrinsic, where people get their incentives from outside. For instance, getting money or being forced to do something. And intrinsic motivation where people do something just because they find it important and they like to do it and they want to do something for society and for other people. And so we looked at reality and we chose a Fortune 500 company, a call center, which is a very active and very modern enterprise. And in order to differentiate two influences that go in different directions, namely when somebody gets an award, he or she might work more and more intensively. But then there is also the opposite influence. Namely when somebody works well, he or she is more likely to get an award. So in order to disentangle these two influences, we gave an award for voluntary behavior within the setting of the call center. For instance, if a colleague is in difficulty or if somebody gets ill and somebody has to step in inadvertently, this is voluntary work. And then we gave an award for voluntary work. And then we looked whether the core activity, namely accepting and answering calls, would also be affected, positively affected. The findings were very nice. First of all we found out that people like to get awards. Why? Awards means that they are appreciated, that their work is acknowledged. And in too many firms all over the world, the superiors don't do that sufficiently. They don't give nice words for good work, but they think people are paid and therefore they do their work. But the real thing is really to be acknowledged. And so the first finding was that persons working in the call center and doing this voluntary work were delighted to get it. And secondly, there was indeed a spillover effect on the core activity. So those people who got an award because they did voluntary work also worked better in answering phone calls and being nice to the clients. The findings are quite relevant for today's work. I think on the whole, our enterprises are too much concentrated on money as an incentive instrument. And we find that purely symbolic awards, where you get an award, but your superior tells you why you get the award and he or she will tell you, we give you the award because you do so good work, because you do extraordinary work, because you are really integrated into the business. So symbolic awards should have much greater importance in today's firms and also in the public sector and elsewhere. Awards are also a very good way to induce people to work well, because they are cheap. It's much cheaper to give an award than to give bonuses all the time. But secondly, the intrinsic motivation of people is supported and intrinsic motivation is important for firms, because it means that they really stand for the firm they are working in. They don't leave just for if they get a little bit money from another firm. They are committed to the firm's goals and that is an extremely important part of the activity of a firm. And if that is not the case, people strictly do only the work they are forced to do and everything else is disregarded. But with this principle you cannot lead a good firm, especially as you cannot tell in advance what will be the requirements for a job. You cannot fix exactly what will be in the future, because the future is unknown. So people must be internally motivated and then future requirements, still unknown future requirements, will be much better met. There are also disadvantages to giving awards, namely it may happen that too many awards are dished out and then they of course are no longer taken seriously and I'm afraid some American firms do that. They have enormous numbers of awards and then of course the employee don't take that seriously anymore. So it's very important not to inflate awards and to hand them out in a serious way. The superiors must really think what is the special contribution of this person and when giving the award should address that. There is a lot of future work to be done in the area of awards. We did ourselves, we looked at one of the most important awards an economist can get. It's called the Don Bates Clark Medal for the best young American economist. Many of them afterwards get the Nobel Prize, so it's an important thing. And we looked at whether those people who got this award would publish more in the future, be more active. We find that the activity rate increases by 15% and moreover the citations received by the winners increases by even 50%. So it shows that this award indeed has a positive effect on performance. Then secondly we looked at Wikipedia. Everybody knows Wikipedia, but Wikipedia isn't in trouble because the contributors don't go on contributing additional topics. Usually they write one and then drop out. And so in order to fight this dropout rate, we instituted an award. And we find that those persons who got an award, this award, really continued working for Wikipedia. These are just two examples where one can look at the effect of awards on performance. There are so many other possibilities. And then a very interesting, quite different aspect is dishonourable awards. Awards given for bad performance. And a good example is the IG Ig Nobel Prize. It means Ig Nobel Nobel Prize. It is given to a scientist for crazy and superfluous and bad scientific work. And it would be interesting to see whether those people who get that prize after it stopped to work because they think I'm really a bad person, I'm not a good scientist or whether there is reactance, which means that people say, oh now I show mankind that I'm a good scientist and I work more.