Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Game elements like points and levels are a popular tool tonudge and engage students and customers. Yet, no theory cantell us which incentive structures work and how to design them.Here we connect the practice of gamification to the theory ofreward shaping in reinforcement learning. We leverage thisconnection to develop a method for designing effective incen-tive structures and delineating when gamification will succeedfrom when it will fail. We evaluate our method in two behav-ioral experiments. The results of the first experiment demon-strate that incentive structures designed by our method helppeople make better, less short-sighted decisions and avoid thepitfalls of less principled approaches. The results of the sec-ond experiment illustrate that such incentive structures can beeffectively implemented using game elements like points andbadges. These results suggest that our method provides a prin-cipled way to leverage gamification to help people make betterdecisions.