{"id":67389,"date":"2009-12-07T02:45:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-07T07:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/mit-uses-selfish-profit-incentives-to-fast-track-research-2009-12"},"modified":"2009-12-07T02:45:00","modified_gmt":"2009-12-07T07:45:00","slug":"mit-uses-selfish-profit-incentives-to-win-military-challenge-in-a-single-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/67389","title":{"rendered":"MIT Uses Selfish Profit Incentives To Win Military Challenge In A Single Day"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"float_right\" src=\"http:\/\/static.businessinsider.com\/~~\/f?id=4b1cb1e5000000000044ee73&amp;maxX=400\" border=\"0\" alt=\"MIT Red Balloon\" width=\"400\" \/><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<div style=\"float: left; padding: 15px 15px 15px 0;\">\n<script type=\"text\/javascript\">\/\/ <![CDATA[\ntweetmeme_source = 'moneygame'; tweetmeme_service = 'bit.ly';\n\/\/ ]]><\/script><br \/>\n<script src=\"http:\/\/tweetmeme.com\/i\/scripts\/button.js\" type=\"text\/javascript\"><\/script>\n<\/div>\n<p>There&#8217;s nothing wrong with hoping for charity and good-intentions from people, but in the end profit incentives provide the most effective way to motivate large numbers of people to join together and solve problems.<\/p>\n<p>A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) just made this very clear when presented by an internet contest from the U.S. Department of Defense:<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/technology\/2009\/dec\/07\/darpa-challenge\">The Guardian<\/a>: The Darpa Network Challenge, which took place on Saturday, offered a cash prize for the first group to successfully locate 10 large red weather balloons hidden at a string of secret locations across the US.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">Competitors were asked to use the internet and social networking sites to discover the whereabouts of the balloons, in what Darpa &#8211; the Pentagon&#8217;s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency &#8211; said was an experiment to discover how the internet could help with rapid problem solving.<\/p>\n<p>The MIT team completed what was supposed to be a nine-hour challenge in just nine-hours. How? They paid out a portion of their prize money to whomever could help them.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">The winning team has not explained precisely how they came to discover the location of all 10 balloons, but the process detailed on the team website explains that they created a viral campaign to encourage people to put forward information they gleaned about the locations.<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">The team offered the first person to spot a balloon a $2,000 share of the prize money, but smaller awards would also be given to those who referred that player to MIT&#8217;s website &#8211; a scheme of incentives aimed at getting people to urge their friends to take part.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s a sense for how they set up the incentive structure:&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/balloon.media.mit.edu\/\">MIT Red Balloon:<\/a> Have all your friends sign up using your personalized invitation. If anyone you invite, or anyone they invite, or anyone they invite (&#8230;and so on) win money, then so will you!<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">We&#8217;re giving $2000 per balloon to the first person to send us the correct coordinates, but that&#8217;s not all &#8212; we&#8217;re also giving $1000 to the person who invited them. Then we&#8217;re giving $500 whoever invited the inviter, and $250 to whoever invited them, and so on..<\/p>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\">Checking out <a href=\"http:\/\/balloon.media.mit.edu\/\">the team&#8217;s website here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/mit-uses-selfish-profit-incentives-to-fast-track-research-2009-12#comments\">Join the conversation about this story &#187;<\/a><\/p>\n<p><b>See Also:<\/b><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/put-your-profits-first-always-2009-12\">Put Profits First &#8212; Always<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/j-crew-reports-443-million-q3-profit-2009-11\">J. Crew Reports $44.3 Million Q3 Profit (JCG)<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.businessinsider.com\/now-the-fha-is-subsidizing-hedge-funds-that-flip-mortgages-for-easy-profits-2009-11\">Now The FHA Is Subsidizing Hedge Funds That Flip Mortgages For Easy Profits<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/feeds.feedburner.com\/~r\/TheMoneyGame\/~4\/dTF35tfa7AI\" height=\"1\" width=\"1\"\/><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>There&#8217;s nothing wrong with hoping for charity and good-intentions from people, but in the end profit incentives provide the most effective way to motivate large numbers of people to join together and solve problems. A team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) just made this very clear when presented by an internet contest from [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-67389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=67389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/67389\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=67389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=67389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=67389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}