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Field
Abstract
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Before
Understanding why people have a desire to participate in science has critical implications for policy in public and private organizations, and for economic development and productivity more generally. Despite the importance of how and why people contribute to science, we know very little about these questions beyond the importance of career concerns for professional scientists. With the rise of crowd-sourcing and voluntary digital content provision, the potential for voluntary scientific contributions to advance scientific discovery could be large. Importantly, career concerns are unlikely to be important motivators for these volunteers. In this paper, we investigate why people voluntarily contribute to science and whether this desire can be increased through certain non-monetary incentives and research task modifications by running a field experiment on a voluntary crowd science platform. In particular, we will vary the expected social and scientific reputational rewards from participation, and the extent to which the scientific contribution of the project is emphasized. We will test how these variations affect the extent and quality of participation relative to an otherwise identical control project.
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After
Understanding why people have a desire to participate in science has critical implications for policy in public and private organizations, and for economic development and productivity more generally. Despite the importance of how and why people contribute to science, we know very little about these questions beyond the importance of career concerns for professional scientists. With the rise of crowd-sourcing and voluntary digital content provision, the potential for voluntary scientific contributions to advance scientific discovery could be large. Importantly, career concerns are unlikely to be important motivators for these volunteers. In this paper, we investigate why people voluntarily contribute to science and whether this desire can be increased through certain non-monetary incentives and research task modifications by running a field experiment on a voluntary crowd science platform. In particular, we will vary the expected contribution of the project in terms of scientific output in one treatment, and value of inputs in another. We will test how these variations affect the extent and quality of participation relative to an otherwise identical control project.
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