Strong intrinsic motivation

Roberta Dessi and Aldo Rustichini

No 847, IDEI Working Papers from Institut d'Économie Industrielle (IDEI), Toulouse

Abstract: A large literature in psychology, and more recently in economics, has argued that monetary rewards can reduce intrinsic motivation. We investigate whether the negative impact persists when intrinsic motivation is strong, and test this hypothesis experimentally focusing on the motivation to undertake interesting and challenging tasks, informative about individual ability. We find that this type of task can generate strong intrinsic motivation, that is impervious to the effect of monetary incentives, particularly when the individual is "racing against himself". In our experiments, monetary incentives have no significant impact on performance. In a second experiment using the same kind of task but a setting designed to weaken intrinsic motivation, monetary incentives do have a significant, positive, effect on performance. This result confirms that our experimental setup may, with appropriate conditions, replicate the known crowding out effects.

Date: 2015-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-hrm and nep-soc
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.tse-fr.eu/sites/default/files/TSE/docum ... 2015/wp_idei_847.pdf Full text (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Strong intrinsic motivation (2015)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ide:wpaper:29268

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IDEI Working Papers from Institut d'Économie Industrielle (IDEI), Toulouse Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().