Motivational crowding effects of monetary and nonmonetary incentives: Evidence from a common pool resources experiment in China

Chenyang Xu, Botao Qin and Devan Rawlings

Ecological Economics, 2022, vol. 202, issue C

Abstract: This study examines the motivational crowding effects of a traditional monetary incentive – fines – and a relatively new nonmonetary incentive – a public revelation mechanism – on the conservation of common pool resources. Previous literature largely examines the crowding effects of instruments that include both moral suasion and monetary incentives. This paper examines the crowding effects of these incentives beyond moral suasion. We achieve these purposes by implementing a lab experiment in China. We find that, contrary to much of the previous literature, monetary incentives in the form of high penalties crowd in intrinsic motivation. This effect is primarily observed in individuals with the lowest initial extraction levels. Finally, we find that the public revelation mechanism crowds out intrinsic motivation; this crowd-out effect falls primarily on a specific sub-population, conditional cooperators. The debriefings suggest one possible reason for the crowd-out effects: While the public revelation mechanism pressures subjects to not over-harvest, it also reveals others’ extractions, which happens to be higher than expected. This crowds out the conservation effort of conditional cooperators. This informational function of the public revelation mechanism is generally overlooked in previous literature.

Keywords: Common-pool resources; China; Motivational crowding effects; Mandates; Public revelation mechanism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921800922002580
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
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:eee:ecolec:v:202:y:2022:i:c:s0921800922002580

DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolecon.2022.107597

Access Statistics for this article

Ecological Economics is currently edited by C. J. Cleveland

More articles in Ecological Economics from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().