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Extrinsic rewards and crowding-out of prosocial behaviour

Nature Human Behaviour volume 6, pages 774–781 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

The law of supply is a fundamental principle of economics and states that any increase in price will increase the quantity supplied. In the case of prosocial behaviour, however, increasing rewards have reduced supply, posing a challenge to standard economic theory. Attempts to study such ‘crowding-out’ have been limited by their small scale and the inherent difficulties posed by calibration of experimental tests. We analyse a large-scale natural experiment in the environmental domain consisting of 20,370 independent observations derived from aggregation of approximately 27 million individual decisions. We find that aggregate supply of prosocial behaviour is ‘s-shaped’, demonstrating how attempts to increase prosocial behaviour using monetary rewards can be counter-productive. Our study shows that results derived from a small set of data points collected from an underlying s-shaped data-generating process are vulnerable to misinterpretation, and that proxy measures of intrinsic motivation ought to be collected to ensure theoretical advance.

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Fig. 1: Percentiles of expected reward (lines) and average quantity recycled (bars) over time.
Fig. 2: Average quantity recycled and expected reward.
Fig. 3: Linear predictions and marginal effects.

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Data availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available for replication from the corresponding author on request. The data cannot be made publicly available due to property rights held by COOP and Statistics Sweden. Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

Custom code that supports the findings of this study is available from the corresponding author on request.

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Acknowledgements

Financial support from the Adlerbertska Foundation (Adlerbertska Forskningsstiftelsen) (C.E.W.), and the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet, 2018-04793) (C.E.W., P.M.) is gratefully acknowledged. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript. Access to data was generously provided by P. Rosengreen (COOP), K. Lundell (Returpack), A. Jensen (Kooperation utan gränser) and E. Ebbeson (Returpack). We thank participants at the Copenhagen Network for Experimental Economics (CNEE), the International Meeting on Experimental and Behavioural Economics (IMEBE), C. Akinci, E. Persson, H. Gutierrez Rufrancos and members of Stirling Behavioural Science Centre, especially P. Ebert, M. Moro and F. de Vries, for helpful comments. Views herein are exclusively those of the authors.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Stirling Management School, Economics Division, Behavioural Science Centre, University of Stirling, Stirling, UK

    Conny E. Wollbrant

  2. Department of Management and Engineering, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden

    Mikael Knutsson

  3. Department of Economics, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden

    Peter Martinsson

  4. Department of Technology, Management and Economics, Technical University of Denmark, Kongens Lyngby, Denmark

    Peter Martinsson

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  1. Conny E. Wollbrant
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Contributions

C.E.W., M.K. and P.M. designed the research. C.E.W., M.K. and P.M. performed the research. C.E.W. and M.K. analysed the data. C.E.W. wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Conny E. Wollbrant.

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Nature Human Behaviour thanks Charles Figuières and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Box plot of expected reward E[rt] by year.

The center line denotes the median; box limits denote first and third quartiles; whiskers denote the highest (lowest) value within 1.5x the interquartile range, measured from box limits; points denote outliers defined as observations larger (smaller) than 1.5x the interquartile range measured from box limits (n = 20,370).

Source data

Extended Data Fig. 2 Box plot of quantity of recycled cans by year.

The center line denotes the median; box limits denote first and third quartiles; whiskers denote the highest (lowest) value within 1.5x the interquartile range, measured from box limits; points denote outliers defined as observations larger (smaller) than 1.5x the interquartile range measured from box limits (n = 20,370).

Source data

Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Robustness checks, Supplementary Fig. 1 and Tables 1 and 2.

Reporting Summary

Supplementary Data

Statistical results to support Supplementary Table 2.

Source data

Source Data Fig. 1

Statistical source data for Fig. 1.

Source Data Fig. 2

Statistical source data for Fig. 2.

Source Data Fig. 3

Statistical source data for Fig. 3.

Source Data Extended Data Fig. 1

Statistical source data for Extended Fig. 1.

Source Data Extended Data Fig. 2

Statistical source data for Extended Fig. 2.

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Wollbrant, C.E., Knutsson, M. & Martinsson, P. Extrinsic rewards and crowding-out of prosocial behaviour. Nat Hum Behav 6, 774–781 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01293-y

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