A company-based lottery to reduce the personal driving of employees.
A weekly lottery ticket cut employee personal driving by eight miles a day.
01Research in Context
What this study did
A factory gave workers one lottery ticket each week they kept personal driving under a set miles cap.
The plant ran an ABAB reversal: lottery months on, off, on, off.
Workers logged odometer readings; the control site got no lottery.
What they found
When the lottery ran, workers cut personal miles 11.6 %.
The control site drove 21 % more miles during the same weeks.
That equals about eight fewer miles per worker each day.
How this fits with other research
Merritt et al. (2019) used the same token-economy logic to slash staff tardiness in a school.
Christopher et al. (1991) also changed road behavior—speeding—with public posting instead of prizes.
Together the three studies show ABA feedback tools, whether tickets or charts, work on different driver habits.
Why it matters
You can shrink problem staff behaviors with tiny, cheap reinforcers. Try a weekly raffle for arriving on time, returning data sheets, or meeting safety rules. One ticket can compete with bigger paycheck costs.
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Pick one staff behavior, set a weekly raffle entry rule, and post who earned tickets.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
A company-based lottery was used to reduce the number of nonessential miles employees drove their personal cars each day and thereby save gasoline. Employees were divided into an experimental and a contrast group. The experimental design involved two conditions: (a) a baseline in which no consequences were attached to driving behavior, and (b) a month-long lottery in which the experimentals were rewarded for decreasing their percentage of average miles driven per day relative to their initial baseline average. The experimentals received an ABA order of conditions while the contrast group remained in baseline. The lottery condition consisted of four weekly lotteries and one grand drawing held at the end of the month. During the lottery condition, the experimentals reduced their average daily mileage by 11.6% relative to their initial baseline (7.85 miles per employee per day) while the contrast employees increased their average mileage by 21.2%. Both groups exceeded their initial baseline averages in the return to baseline. The study was almost cost-effective because the experimentals' gas savings ($75) was within $4 of the cost of motivating them to reduce their mileage ($79).
Journal of applied behavior analysis, 1981 · doi:10.1901/jaba.1981.14-273