Do All Material Incentives for Prosocial Activities Backfire? The Response to Cash and Non-Cash Incentives for Blood Donations

By Nicola Lacetera, Mario Macis. Social Science Research Network, 2009

210 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Experimental studies document that financial rewards discourage the performance of altruistic activities, because they destroy intrinsic altruistic motivations. We set up a randomized-controlled experiment, through a survey administered to 467 blood donors in an Italian town, and find that donors are not reluctant to receive compensation in general: A substantial share of respondents declared they would stop being donors if paid a small amount of cash, but we do not find such effects when a voucher of the same nominal value is offered instead. The aversion to direct cash payments is particularly marked among women and older respondents, while there are neither gender nor age differences in the response to the voucher. Implications for research and public policy are discussed.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Management of Technology and Innovation, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2df724a39c601647fbaaae003ced872c4e85d2ba

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

1. Maria Abascal
2. J. Gowdy

In Management of Technology and Innovation

1. E. Corbera
2. Nicolás Kosoy

In Safety Research

1. R. Norgaard
2. G. Hecken
3. Maria Abascal
4. J. Gowdy
5. L. Rival
6. A. Vatn
7. Delia Baldassarri
8. R. Muradian

Citations in the corpus

• Payments for ecosystem services and the fatal attraction of win‐win solutions (2013, background): “These considerations are important when the context is characterized by strong civic values, social norms and habits of cooperation (Lacetera and Macis 2010; Narloch et al. 2012).”
• Between markets and hierarchies: The challenge of governing ecosystem services (2012, background): “Though scattered, the evidence gathered so far (Frey and Jegen, 2001; Fehr and Falk, 2002; Bowles, 2008; Charness and Gneezy, 2009; Lacetera and Macis, 2010) suggests that the behavioural outcomes of incentives are particularly dependent on three factors: the nature of motivations; the psychological”
• Field experiments across the social sciences (2017, background): “At times, monetary incentives prove counterproductive, but in-kind incentives do the trick (for example, Heyman & Ariely 2004, Lacetera & Macis 2010).”
• When Giving Money Does Not Work: The Differential Effects of Monetary Versus In-Kind Rewards in Referral Reward Programs (2014, unknown): “However, recent research reveals that money performs more poorly than in-kind rewards in motivating, for example, blood donations (Lacetera and Macis 2010), workplace productivity (Dur and Non 2010), and the egalitarian distribution of resources (DeVoe and Iyengar 2010).”