Abstract
Many actions in organizations do not directly benefit the individuals who take them, yet they create meaningful value for others or for the organization as a whole. Such behaviors are often described as citizenship behaviors. Despite their importance for learning and improvement, it remains unclear how organizations can encourage individuals to engage in them at scale. We examine this question in the setting of student course evaluations at a major French business school. Completing an evaluation is a voluntary contribution that can support teaching and program improvements. Yet, it offers limited immediate private benefits to the individual student. As a result, participation is often lower than institutions would like, even though evaluations are an important input into improvement processes. Our field experiment is cluster randomized at the student cohort level. Cohorts are defined by program and year, hence all students within a given cohort are selected into the same condition. Our intervention is delivered through the school’s internal platform during the evaluation window. In the control condition, students receive the usual reminder to complete evaluations through the standard notification system. In the first treatment condition, students see a banner that summarizes their own evaluation participation history for the current academic year, making their individual past behavior salient and easy to track. In the second treatment condition, students see course specific information that reports the peer participation rate for each course they are taking, making participation more socially visible in aggregate. Our main outcome is whether students complete course evaluations. We test whether either prompt increases completion relative to business as usual, and whether the two prompts differ in their effects.