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Does Pay Motivate Volunteers?

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Author Info
Bruno S. Frey
Lorenz Goette

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Abstract

Volunteer work is an increasingly large, yet ill-understood sector of the economy. We show that monetary rewards undermine the intrinsic motivation of volunteers. A unique data set from Switzerland allows us to assess the effects of financial rewards on the effort put into volunteer work. There is a fairly standard pattern regarding the volunteers reaction e.g. to more labor market work hours. But we obtain the puzzling result that, when rewarded, volunteers work less. These findings are in line with a large literature in social psychology emphasizing that external rewards can undermine the intrinsic motivation for an activity. We show the implications for public policy towards volunteering.

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Paper provided by Institute for Empirical Research in Economics - IEW in its series IEW - Working Papers with number iewwp007.

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Handle: RePEc:zur:iewwpx:007

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Related research
Keywords: Volunteer Work; Crowding-Out; Intrinsic Motivation; Price Incentives.;

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
A13 - General Economics and Teaching - - General Economics - - - Relation of Economics to Social Values
D23 - Microeconomics - - Production and Organizations - - - Organizational Behavior; Transaction Costs; Property Rights
J30 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Wages, Compensation, and Labor Costs - - - General

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Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
  1. Frey, Bruno S, 1992. "Tertium Datur: Pricing, Regulating and Intrinsic Motivation," Kyklos, Blackwell Publishing, vol. 45(2), pages 161-84.
  2. Frey, Bruno S, 1997. "A Constitution for Knaves Crowds Out Civic Virtues," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 107(443), pages 1043-53, July. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  3. Brown, Eleanor & Lankford, Hamilton, 1992. "Gifts of money and gifts of time estimating the effects of tax prices and available time," Journal of Public Economics, Elsevier, vol. 47(3), pages 321-341, April. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  4. Freeman, Richard B, 1997. "Working for Nothing: The Supply of Volunteer Labor," Journal of Labor Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 15(1), pages S140-66, January. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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This item has more than 25 citations. To prevent cluttering this page, these citations are listed on a separate page.
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