Volunteering at the Workplace under Incomplete Information: Team Size Does Not Matter

Tobias Werner, Adrian Hillenbrand and Fabian Winter

VfS Annual Conference 2020 (Virtual Conference): Gender Economics from Verein für Socialpolitik / German Economic Association

Abstract: Volunteering is a widespread allocation mechanism at the workplace and emerges naturally in open-source software development, the generation of online knowledge platforms, and to some extent in "agile" work environments. Using a field experiment with 8 treatments and close to 2,800 workers on an online labor market, we study the effect of team size on volunteering at the workplace under incomplete information. In stark contrast to the theoretical predictions, we find no effect of team size on volunteering behavior. With the use of our control treatments, we can show that workers react to free-riding incentives provided by the volunteering setting in general, but do not react strategically to the team size. We show that the result is robust to several further factors.

JEL-codes: C72 C93 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-hrm
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:vfsc20:224519

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