Something that provides a motive for a person to choose a particular course of action. Organized cooperative activities in a social setting -- such as cooperation for the purpose of economic production -- depends upon each of the participants having some sort of incentive to behave in the required cooperative fashion. Different societies (and even different organizations within the same society) vary considerably in the nature of the incentive systems upon which they characteristically rely to organize their common projects.

Incentives may be classified according to a number of different schemes, but one of the more useful classifications subdivides incentives into three general types: moral incentives, coercive incentives and remunerative incentives.

All known societies employ all three sorts of incentives to at least some degree in order to evoke from its members the necessary degree of cooperation for the society to survive and flourish. However, different societies differ radically in the relative proportions of these different kinds of incentives used within their characteristic mix of incentives. "Primitive" or "traditional" cultures such as those of hunter-gatherers tend to rely very heavily on moral incentives and make relatively little use of coercive and remunerative incentives to sustain social cooperation. More "advanced" or "modern" societies built around a much more specialized and complex division of labor tend to make much greater use of both coercive and remunerative incentives in organizing social activities, while still relying in very important ways upon moral or normative incentives. Among the more "advanced" societies, liberal societies try to rely as much as possible on remunerative and moral incentives in preference to the use of coercive incentives, while authoritarian and totalitarian societies display much less reluctance to resort to coercive incentives in securing social cooperation.

[See also: division of labor, specialization, ideology, liberalism, totalitarianism, agency problem]