This article starts from several African legendary stories, elicits the powerful role of incentives, and uses examples to analyze how to set up successful incentive signals. Finally, combined with practical HE Tuber application summary, it proposes strategies such as external incentives, commitment, socialization, and temptation bundling to maintain motivational effect. Let’s explore the logic behind the incentive system!

Or check in the Moments of various English learning software and forward it, and if you insist on it for 30 days, you can get the tuition refund?

Or the year-end performance sprint where you work overtime for the year-end bonus?

We seem to be easily influenced by the motivational strategies designed by others, so how do these motivational policies work? How did it fail? Are cash incentives more effective than honor incentives?

Today, we deeply analyze the underlying logic of the success of the incentive system from the perspectives of behavioral economics, psychology, game theory, etc., and summarize how we apply incentive strategies to help corporate management, help individuals identify problems, change behaviors, and design incentive policies for users.

Whether you are an entrepreneur, product manager or marketer, you can get valuable insights. (The article is very long, it is recommended to save it and read it carefully)

Without further ado, let’s go directly to the main text, Enjoy:

What's the incentive? Simply put, it refers to a mechanism that allows others to voluntarily do what we expect them to do by setting a series of reward and punishment rules driven by certain incentives, and solidifying these behaviors into habits through constant feedback.

You may not imagine that incentives can be powerful enough to change a region's centuries-old ingrained cultural practices and traditions. The following legendary stories happened in Tanzania and Kenya in East Africa.

The Maasai are the largest nomadic ethnic group in the East African grasslands and the most representative ethnic group. With a population of approximately 1 million, the Maasai are known as the "primitive people of modern society." The reason why I say this is because the Maasai people still live under a strict tribal system and are managed by the elders of the tribe.

The Maasai people make a living by herding cattle and raising sheep, and live together with African lions in the East African savannah. Lions will occasionally attack domestic animals when conditions are harsh. When such an attack occurs, Maasai warriors chase and spear the lion. The Maasai and the lions have lived in this balance for hundreds of years.

However, due to economic development and population growth, the natural habitat of lions has been lost, and the number of lions has dropped sharply from 200,000 thirty years ago to 20,000.

Lions are not only related to Kenya's international image, but also the lifeblood of the local tourism industry; if their numbers decline sharply and become endangered species, they will also disrupt the balance of the natural food chain and lead to the deterioration of the ecological environment.

Therefore, the government specially invited the Uri Gneezy team from the University of California to try to gently change the Maasai people's lion-killing custom through incentives, and the "Simba Project" was born (Simba refers to lion in the local language).

Traditionally, when cattle and sheep were attacked by lions, tribal elders would gather warriors to chase the lions together. Although this response did not compensate the elders for the loss caused by the dead cattle, it did successfully prevent future attacks on the livestock by lions.

Under the Simba Plan, Maasai elders whose cattle were killed by lions could receive financial compensation, but only if no lions were killed in the area after the incident.

This incentive plan changed the decision-making thinking of tribal elders

One key to the plan's effectiveness is how much money to compensate the elders. If Simba planned to provide every elder who didn't summon a warrior with a ridiculously large amount of money, say $1 million, that would certainly be feasible. However, with the death of the first cow, the program goes bankrupt and the problems continue.

Instead, the Simba program takes into account the market value of the livestock in question and compensates based on that amount. Compared with the economic benefits that lion tourism brings to the Maasai people, compensation appears to be an affordable price. This financial calculation is extremely important as it makes the program financially sustainable.

Preventing cheating and insurance fraud is also key. By establishing a verification agency and strengthening cattle and sheep fences, this incentive program can be successfully run. The lions in Kenya have escaped disaster and their numbers have gradually recovered.