Getting paid to take your medicine - good incentive or bad policy?

When you were young, Mom and Dad gave you an allowance for doing chores. Now as an adult, can similar incentives get you to take your pills, quit smoking or lose weight?

Or to put in another way, could some of the financial elements of NBC's The Biggest Loser get translated into real life?

Those questions are being asked in several studies from two University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine researchers, Dr. Kevin G. Volpp and Dr. Stephen E. Kimmel.

In the first set of three studies, all relatively small in size, patients with a possibility of strokes who regularly fail to take their blood thinner medicine warfarin are offered a lottery-like incentive program.