Time is Money: A Natural Field Experiment on How a Non-Monetary Timely Feedback System Motivates Volunteers

Abstract:     
A natural field experiment is designed to explore the crowding effects of a timely feedback system on voluntary contributions according to their original dominant motivation (intrinsic/extrinsic). This paper finds crowding-in effect of a one-way timely feedback for both types of volunteers. However, a two-way timely feedback has a detrimental effect for intrinsic volunteers (crowding-out), while enhances extrinsic volunteers’ performance (crowding-in). Furthermore, the crowding effect is robust to those aware of the feedback in advance or with access to the median score. These findings show the significance of original dominant motivation, since it will affect the change rate of intrinsic/extrinsic motivation.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 37

Keywords: volunteer work, crowding-out, crowding-in, intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, natural field experiment

JEL Classification: C93, D03, D64

working papers series