Information Nudging and Monetary Incentives: A Green Partnership for Volunteering?

Shifting individual behaviour is an important tool for addressing environmental issues and there is a wide literature evaluating interventions to encourage pro-environmental behaviour. One important question is the effect of combining interventions to affect behaviour. In this paper, we evaluate the effects of two interventions – a monetary incentive and an information nudge targeting intrinsic motivation – on nature restoration volunteering. We use a two-by-two treatment design to evaluate the individual and combined effects of the interventions in a field experiment setting. We find that neither the monetary incentive nor the information nudge alone are effective at shifting behaviour. However, there are considerable positive synergies between the monetary incentive and nudge. The monetary incentive becomes more than twice as effective when it is combined with an information nudge. Our results have important policy implications, showing that concerns around motivation crowding out from monetary incentives could be mitigated by simple, low-cost information nudges targeting intrinsic motivation.