Do extrinsic rewards stimulate co-creation? Prove from an experimental study

Co-creation, or the involvement of citizens in the design and production process of public services, has received scanned scholarly attention in past years (for an overview see Voorberg, Bekkers and Tummers 2014). Theories of... [ view full abstract ]

Co-creation, or the involvement of citizens in the design and production process of public services, has received scanned scholarly attention in past years (for an overview see Voorberg, Bekkers and Tummers 2014). Theories of co-creation and co-production argue that citizens who participate in co-creation are often motivated by intrinsic values, such as civic duty, or their wish to improve local communities (Sharp 1980; Ostrom 1996). Likewise, empirical accounts highlight the distinct importance of people’s intrinsic motivations and self-efficacy in the process of co-creation (Wise et al 2012; Bovaird et al 2013). Yet, we do not know how stable these motivations are, and whether they change in the context of economic incentives. This question is of great theoretical and practical pedigree, since governments have been discussing repeatedly how to foster citizens’ involvement, most notably through various types of extrinsic rewards such as time-banking (e.g. Glynos and Speed 2012). The basic assumption here is that offering people extrinsic rewards, would increase their propensity to engage in such prosocial activities. Or simply, financial incentives would steer citizens to behave prosaically. This assumption directly corresponds to neoclassical economic theory. In contrast, psychological theories of motivation crowding suggest that extrinsic rewards crowd-out individuals’ intrinsic motivations in a variety of different settings (Titmuss 1970; Frey 1997; see also Ariely et al 2009; Niza, Tung and Marteau 2014). Here it is argued that extrinsic rewards – who are mainly corresponding to individual’s extrinsic motivation - undermine people’s intrinsic motivation, and thereby their willingness to behave prosocial (i.e., contributing to the public good). As a result financial incentives would decrease people’s intrinsic motivation to behave prosocial, and thereby reduce their actual prosocial behavior.

Thus we have two competing theoretical accounts of how extrinsic rewards affect citizens’ willingness to co-create. Therefore, in this study, we test whether we find a crowding-out effect in the context of citizens’ willingness to co-create public services, as suggested by the theory of motivation crowding, or whether we find support for the neoclassical perspective of a crowding-in of co-creation.

To test these theoretical predictions we draw upon a series of experiments. In a first step, we conduct a behavioral experiment in the laboratory. Here we investigate whether the presence of a monetary reward increases students’ propensity to participate in offering voluntary services to refugees. The lab environment enables us the test our theoretical predictions within a clean environment. In a next step, we implement a vignette-based survey experiment across a national-diverse sample (n=1200). Here we included a variation on the ‘treatment’, varying between 2 euro’s and 10 euro’s. This enables us not only to extend the external validity of our findings in our first experiment, but also to test whether a relation exists between the willingness of citizens to co-create and the amount of money offered in return.