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The purpose of this paper is to explore how loyalty marketers are inspiring and incentivizing consumers to stay healthy in the wake of sky‐rocketing health care costs and a new US health care bill.

The paper's approach is to tap into well‐known wellness program providers, like Virgin HealthMiles, CIGNA and CVS Caremark, to provide insight into how marketers are looking to utilize the “carrot” (positive incentives) to inspire consumers to stay healthy rather than the stick (punishment).

The new health care legislation signed by President Obama in March, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, has put a firm stamp of approval and support behind the use of incentives and rewards by health and wellness programs. In effect, loyalty marketing tactics are becoming a more important tool than ever in health care reform. Most noticeably, beginning in 2014, employers will be able to offer their workers an increased amount of rewards, worth up to 30‐50 percent of their health coverage costs, for participating in a wellness program and meeting health benchmarks. In addition, health insurance companies will be required to implement health and wellness promotion activities.

Deploying loyalty tactics by the “carrot” contingent has put into practice the growing disciplines of “behavioral economics” and “choice architecture” that have become hot topics over the past couple of years within various industries, including government and finance. Best‐selling books such as Freakonomics and Predictably Irrational have focused on behavioral economics, defined as the use of social, cognitive and emotional factors in understanding and influencing the decisions of individuals. Digital tools are being used to create a handy consumer‐direct link and motivational boost to the consumer‐pharmacy relationship. WellQ – a wellness behavior‐change program developed by LoyaltyOne in partnership with the American Pharmacists Association – seeks to help patients shift their own behavior around their medications and health care, with the help of their retail pharmacy, where consumers sign up and provide a profile of medications and current health habits. Through WellQ, they then begin to receive mobile text‐based reminders as well as bite‐size educational and motivational content around self‐care delivered to their cell phones.

The paper provides exclusive interviews with representatives from some of the largest wellness program providers in the industry today. It also gives tangible tips and tools to utilize in real‐world marketing plans.

This study seeks to explore health workers' perceptions and experiences on incentives for motivating and retaining them in primary health-care facilities in rural Ghana.

Phenomenological research design was used to explore health workers’ experiences and perceptions on their incentive packages. Sixty-eight in-depth interviews were conducted with health-care workers in primary health-care facilities and analyzed using thematic analysis approach.

The findings show health-care workers’ perceptions on their incentives, ranging from low awareness, unfair distribution, favoritism, means of punishment and incentives regarded unattractive. The preferred incentive packages identified were salary increase, housing availability, recognition, adequate supplies, and risk and responsibility allowances. Health-care workers suggested for the modification of incentives including vehicle importation waiver, reduction in study leave years and opportunity to pursue desired courses.

The findings suggest that incentives that align with health-care workers’ preferences can potentially improve their motivation and influence retention. Health-care workers’ concern on incentives having been used as favors and punishment as well as unfair distribution should be addressed by health managers and policymakers, to achieve the desired purpose of motivating and retaining them in rural areas. Appropriate internal monitoring mechanisms are needed for incentives regulation and to improve health workers’ retention in rural Ghana.

Understanding health experts' online free knowledge contribution behavior is vital for promoting health knowledge and improving health literacy. This study focuses on the spillover effects of different monetary incentive levels on health experts' free knowledge contribution behavior.

In 2016, Zhihu Live and Zhi Hu were launched as two types of paid knowledge products on Zhihu.com, a hybrid knowledge exchange platform. Focusing on the policy impact of launching Zhihu Live and Zhi Hu, this study uses the difference-in-differences model to analyze the heterogeneous spillover effects of high-yield and low-yield monetary incentives on health experts' free knowledge contribution behavior.

In the short term, the high-yield monetary incentive has positive spillover effects on the quantity and quality of free knowledge contribution while the low-yield monetary incentive generates opposite effects. In the long term, the effects of the high-yield monetary incentive remain significantly positive. The effect of the low-yield monetary incentive on the quantity of free knowledge contribution remains significantly negative, but its effect on the quality of free knowledge contribution is not significant.

This study combines theories of reciprocity and resource limitation to study the spillover effects of different monetary incentive levels on health experts' online behavior. The short-term and long-term effects of different monetary incentive levels on health experts' online behavior are also explored.

Traditionally in health care and in the public sector more generally, little thought has been given to the impact of provider‐oriented incentives on the delivery of services. There has been an assumption that the language of incentives belonged to the private sector and was inappropriate in the public sector. Instead, the governance of health care has relied on the professional ethos of clinicians to direct decision making. Implicitly there has been an expectation that the ethical stance of clinicians would ensure that their actions were always in the best interest of patients. However, in the context of a heightened awareness of cost constraints there has been a greater emphasis on the active management of resources in medical organizations. This article argues that the structure of incentives in health care is highly significant in resource allocation, as medical ethics does not provide an unambiguous guide to clinical decision making. The paper defines the nature of the financial and professional incentives in medical organizations and discusses their impact on the delivery of services through an analysis of positive and negative effects. By undertaking a comparison between the UK and Canada, the paper identifies the differential nature of the incentives present in the health care systems of these two countries and discusses some of their consequences.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how tailoring financial incentives for healthy behaviors to employees’ goals, values, and aspirations might improve the efficacy of incentives.

The authors integrate insights from self-determination theory (SDT) with principles from behavioral economics in the design of financial incentives by linking how incentives could help meet an employee’s life goals, values, or aspirations.

Tailored financial incentives could be more effective than standard incentives in promoting autonomous motivation necessary to initiate healthy behaviors and sustain them after incentives are removed.

Previous efforts to improve the design of financial incentives have tested different incentive designs that vary the size, schedule, timing, and target of incentives. The strategy for tailoring incentives builds on strong evidence that difficult behavior changes are more successful when integrated with important life goals and values. The authors outline necessary research to examine the effectiveness of this approach among at-risk employees.

Instead of offering simple financial rewards for engaging in healthy behaviors, existing programs could leverage incentives to promote employees’ autonomous motivation for sustained health improvements.

Effective application of these concepts could lead to programs more effective at improving health, potentially at lower cost.

The approach for the first time integrates key insights from SDT, behavioral economics, and tailoring to turn an extrinsic reward for behavior change into an internalized, self-sustaining motivator for long-term engagement in risk-reducing behaviors.

This paper aims to provide a literature review of corporate wellness programs to develop recommendations for effective internal marketing of healthy behaviors in work environments.

A review of research literature published since 2000 addresses corporate wellness programs’ justifications and best program design practices.

Corporate and employee benefits documented in the literature are reviewed and best practices from published literature are identified to guide the design of wellness programs. These include framing clear messages, alignment of corporate culture and business strategy with wellness program goals, senior leader support, clear objectives and evaluation, incorporation of peer support and enjoyable activities, utilization of effective priming for healthy choices and consideration of legal and ethical incentives.

Further research is needed, including how to frame messages for diverse work groups, how to carry out effective program assessments, what types of marketing appeals are effective, what wellness activities lead to healthy behavior change and how is increased employee productivity related to quality of life. Additional questions include how priming encourages healthy behaviors, what promotes healthy workplace cultures and what social marketing appeals promote healthy behaviors.

Senior managers can implement findings to create effective wellness programs benefiting employees and firms through improved employee health and productivity and reduced corporate health-care costs.

Effective wellness programs reduce overall health-care costs for society and provide improved participants’ quality of work, personal and family life.

This research uniquely applies internal marketing, social marketing and marketing exchange concepts to best practices from the wellness literature and applies these to recommendations for effective corporate-based wellness programs.

Many companies in the USA have corporate wellness programs but are having trouble encouraging employees to take part in these programs. Even with monetary incentives, many employees do not join. The purpose of this paper is to consider whether timely reminders combined with monetary incentives improve participation in health benefit programs.

Employees of a large manufacturing company across multiple facilities were encouraged to enroll in a messaging service. Once a week, members received an SMS or e-mail reminder to complete a Health Risk Assessment (HRA) and Health Action Plan (HAP). The authors segmented employees based on prior year health insurance plan choice and HRA participation to analyze current HRA and HAP completion, with and without intervention.

The intervention increased completion rates 6 percent for subgroups that completed the HRA in the prior year and 34–37 percent for those that did not.

Corporate wellness programs should develop good communication channels with employees. The effectiveness of such programs will depend also on employee engagement.

With better communication, companies could raise participation in corporate wellness programmes and potentially reduce some of the monetary incentives that they currently offer.

Managed care organizations use physician incentives to control costs and ensure their financial viability. While the efficacy of incentives may be questioned, substantial challenges exist for physicians who must balance the well-being of their patients and the focus of their professional training with organizational financial concerns. Many physicians experience difficulty in discussing incentive pay with patients (Pearson & Hyams, 2002), even though patients want to know (Pereira & Pearson, 2001) and tend to trust physicians more who are forthright about the issue (Levinson, Kao, Kuby, & Thisted, 2005). Of interest here are patients’ perceptions of the ethicalness of commonly used physician pay incentives. The results of our findings suggest that patients may view these incentives from a different perspective than health policy experts and physician executives. Specifically, our findings indicate that patients perceive incentives based upon patient satisfaction and clinical efficiency more ethically than incentives based upon revenue generation. These views are significantly related to physician visits. We offer suggestions for future research in light of recent pay disclosure regulations.

Most workplace health promotion efforts have failed to consistently and sustainably encourage employees to take responsibility for their health. The purpose of this paper is to explore a potentially high-impact solution – Health Codes of Conduct – for engaging and motivating employees to assume responsibility for their health.

This mixed methods study draws on interview and survey methodology with a sample of 149 working adults to examine the feasibility of Health Codes of Conduct. Descriptive and inferential statistics are calculated to understand reactions, characteristics of the companies likely to support the idea, and components of a Health Code of Conduct.

Nearly all employees offered moderate to high support for Health Codes of Conduct; this included overweight but not obese employees. Additionally, all demographic groups either moderately or strongly supported the policy when they included either monetary incentives (such as prescription discounts) or often overlooked non-monetary incentives (such as employee recognition). Some of the more popular features of Health Codes of Conduct included annual physical exams, exercise routines, and simply being encouraged to stay home when ill.

Health Codes of Conduct offer a surprisingly well-supported potential solution. Favorable reactions were observed across all examined segments of workers, even overweight (but not obese) employees. Using the specific features of Health Codes identified here, visionary companies can tailor their company’s Health Code of Conduct with the appropriate monetary and non-monetary incentives and disincentives.

What if the workplace could be a positive source of health and empowerment for valued employees? The authors show employee Health Codes of Conduct could be this empowering, engaging solution that has been missing.

This paper is the first to propose the concept Health Codes of Conduct and solicit feedback from employees on this novel idea. Furthermore, the authors identify both the monetary and non-monetary incentives and disincentives that employees believe would be most compelling.

The main objective of this work is to design a statistical multiple regression model that helps to empirically explain the impact of economic incentives, management style, emotional health and research activities on university professors in northern Mexico and their perception of happiness.

In this research, the authors analysed the correlation between happiness perception and four independent variables divided into two dimensions: 1. individual dimensions: emotional health and research activities and 2. organisational dimensions: economic incentives and management styles. A questionnaire was developed, tested and analysed for this matter. The authors applied this instrument to 384 university professors of both genders among 1301 in the region.

Using correlational analysis, the authors confirm a strong and statically significant relationship between all variables. It is also no evidence of multicollinearity. Finally, by applying multiple regression analysis, it was accepted that all independent variables have significance in explaining the emergence of personal happiness (R2 = 42%). Finally, the predictive equation presents possible results with values that confirm the effectiveness of the theoretical model. Results indicate that happiness perception is related to independent variables, with economic incentives being the most vital relationship.

This study's limitations are that the novel perspective of the explanatory variables of economic incentives, emotional health, management style and research activities needs additional confirmatory studies. Therefore, the authors need to perform studies with new explanatory perspectives. Another limitation of the study may be considering a cross-sectional and not a longitudinal model. This study considered it more appropriate to analyse the explanatory variables that influence and are the outcome of happiness perception for the data collected. Finally, it is essential to highlight that this research has been conducted in an underdeveloped country. Thus, it should consider conducting subsequent confirmatory studies in similar settings and other types of economies, such as in a developed country.

This paper explains the relevance of two-dimensional activities in the happiness perception of professors. As other studies mention, productivity is correlated to happiness, and production outcomes could be improved if the schools implement policies to promote this perception. Happiness could be a solid strategy to improve academic outcomes, and the results propose several actions to achieve this goal.

This paper addresses an important activity of professors from a perspective of happiness perception. Thus, putting the professor as the leading relevant agent in schools, the authors propose a multivariate analysis of the outcomes of professors' jobs. Both the schools and the professors have their own goals at their own levels. If policies are created based on persons, in this case, professors, to improve organizational goals, then it might profoundly impact social actions inside the schools.

This paper increases the literature on happiness perception studies and proposes the examination of the relationship between perceived personal happiness and dimensions that influence this perception; these are from two kinds: 1. individual dimensions: emotional health and research activities and 2. organisational dimensions: economic incentives and management styles, which is an original approach and open discussion to further new approaches to this study.