Submit a trial

Please use this form to submit your study for inclusion into our database. It will be checked by a member of the Innovation Growth Lab team, who may be in contact to ask for more information.

Your email address *

Your name *

Title *

The name of the study

Short summary

A brief description of the project's goals and its current state

Abstract

Organizations that depend on voluntary contributions face unique managerial challenges. In this project, we examine whether emphasizing the salience of project output (i.e., project outcome) or project input (i.e., labor costs) affect the quantity and quality of contributions using a randomized field experiment on the world's largest crowd science platform. We manipulate whether participants receive information that emphasizes their contribution to the eventual outcome of a task or information that emphasizes their contribution to the labor required for a task. We find that increasing the salience of both output and input value decreases voluntary participation but increases the contribution quality. Our findings are consistent with information improving the match quality between the task and the volunteer. We complement our field experiment with a survey experiment and find evidence that individuals who select out of volunteering in response to the task information provided substitute by donating money from wage work. We discuss implications for organizations employing voluntary labor.

The full abstract of the study, if available

Links

Links to any published papers and related discussions

Authors *

Affiliations

Academic and other institutes that the authors of the study are members of

Delivery partner

Organisations involved in delivering the trial, if appropriate

Year

Month

Day

Journal

Journal publishing the study, if available

Publication stage *

Research theme *

Entrepreneurship

Innovation

Business Growth

Country

Country or countries where this study took place.

Topics

What sort of topics does the study cover?

Sample attributes

Hypotheses / research question

Sample

Trial population and sample selection

Number of treatment groups

Size of treatment groups

For the field experiment: 31,000 people emailed- 10,300 receiving the value of contributor output treatment, 10,300 receiving the value of contributor input treatment, 10,300 receiving the control page. For the survey experiment: 4,189 responses - 544 receiving low outside option, input motivation survey framing, and input motivation task framing; 514 receiving low outside option, output motivation survey framing, and input motivation task framing; 525 receiving high outside option, input motivation survey framing, and input motivation task framing; 480 receiving high outside option, output motivation survey framing, and input motivation task framing; 554 receiving high outside option, input motivation survey framing, and output motivation task framing; 537 receiving high outside option, output motivation survey framing, and output motivation task framing; 519 receiving low outside option, input motivation survey framing, and output motivation task framing; 516 receiving low outside option, output motivation survey framing, and output motivation task framing

Size of control group

Unit of analysis

Clustered?

Yes

No

Cluster details

Trial attributes

Treatment description

Rounds of data collection

Baseline data collection and method

Data collection method and data collected

Evaluation

Outcome variables

Results

Mean outcome comparisons between treatment and control pages demonstrate that first, our treatments impact the types of people that contribute to the project. Contributors to the project page that emphasizes the value of contributor input have lower average scientific experience and capabilities than those who contribute to the output and control pages. These patterns suggest that individuals who contribute to the input page perceive the value of their labor supply as relatively low and are induced to engage when they learn that their labor supply is valuable relative to the organization's outside option. Second, the treatments also affect the quantity and quality of work completed. Both treatments lead to a reduction in the number of classifications each contributor makes relative to the control page. However, once we weight classifications for quality (measured by the accuracy of classifications against expert classifications), the differences between number of contributions across pages become insignificant. This suggests that both treatments improve the quality of classifications at the expense of a reduction in the overall quantity of classifications. Our findings are consistent with information improving the match quality between the task and the volunteer.
	To address measurement limitations associated with our field experiment, we complement our field experiment with a survey experiment in which respondents are randomly assigned high or low outside wage options, and an output or input-based volunteer task motivation. Our survey experiment results support our field experimental results by demonstrating that emphasizing output value of voluntary contributions changes the quantity and composition of volunteers relative to emphasizing the input value of voluntary contributions. Moreover, we find that individuals who select out of volunteering due to the information provision on the task motivation are more likely to compensate with monetary donations than those who would not volunteer regardless of how the task is framed.

Intervention costs

Cost benefit ratio

Reference

Citation for use in academic references