Professor Brad Bass studies the effectiveness of economic or financial incentives like late-pick-up fines, taxes, subsidies, rebates, and carbon taxes — as well as the effectiveness of policy incentives like laws and regulations.
He also examines other factors at play: social factors like a parent’s desire not to inconvenience a daycare worker; personality factors like an individual’s receptiveness to innovation; or political factors that determine a country’s cooperativeness or intransigence with another.
Bass has spent the last 20-some years exploring these questions with groups of undergraduate students enrolled in his Incentivizing Behavioural Change project run as part of the Faculty of Arts & Science’s Research Opportunity Program (ROP). The program provides second- and third-year students with an opportunity to work closely with a professor on a research project.