Financial Rewards Do Not Stimulate Coproduction: Evidence from Two Experiments

• Author: Lars Tummers,Sebastian Jilke,William Voorberg,Victor Bekkers
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.12896
• Date: 01 November 2018
• Published date: 01 November 2018

Public Administration Review,

Vol. 78, Iss. 6, pp. 864–873. © 2018 The

Authors. Public Administration Review

published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. on behalf of

The American Society for Public Administration.

DOI: 10.1111/puar.12896.

864 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited

and is not used for commercial purposes.

Financial Rewards Do Not Stimulate Coproduction:

Evidence from Two Experiments

Abstract : Western governments are increasingly trying to stimulate citizens to coproduce public services by, among

other strategies, offering them financial incentives. However, there are competing views on whether financial incentives

stimulate coproduction. While some argue that financial incentives increase citizens ’ willingness to coproduce, others

suggest that incentives decrease their willingness (i.e., crowding out). To test these competing expectations, the authors

designed a set of experiments that offered subjects a financial incentive to assist municipalities in helping refugees

integrate. The experiment was first conducted among university students within a laboratory setting. Then, the initial

findings were replicated and extended among a general adult sample. Results suggest that small financial rewards have

no effect: they neither increase nor decrease people ’ s willingness to coproduce. When the offered amount is increased

substantially, willingness to coproduce increases only marginally. Hence, financial incentives are not a very cost-

efficient instrument to stimulate coproduction.

Evidence for Practice

• This research shows that modest compensation (2 euros per hour, similar to a time-bank voucher) does not

have a significant effect on people ’ s willingness to coproduce public services. Therefore, governments should

be cautious in offering financial incentives to stimulate people to coproduce.

• Even substantial financial incentives (10 euros per hour, comparable to the net income of a professional

teacher) have only very small effects (6 percentage points) on people ’ s willingness to coproduce. Therefore,

governments are well advised to explore alternative possibilities for stimulating citizens ’ willingness to

coproduce.

• This research indicates that people ’ s motivation to coproduce is not crowded out by financial incentives.

However, given the relatively small effect of financial incentives on people ’ s willingness to coproduce,

governments are advised to strengthen intrinsic public service and prosocial motivations (e.g., solidarity,

charity, etc.) of potential coproducers instead of promoting coproduction by introducing financial incentives.

William Voorberg

Erasmus University Rotterdam

Sebastian Jilke

Rutgers University–Newark

Lars Tummers

Utrecht University

Victor Bekkers

Erasmus University Rotterdam

Lars Tummers is associate professor

in the School of Governance at Utrecht

University. His research interests are

public management, leadership, and

citizen-state interactions. Related to this,

he has developed an interdisciplinary

field combining psychology and public

administration, called behavioral public

administration.

E-mail: 1.g.tummers@uu.nl

Sebastian Jilke is assistant professor

in the School of Public Affairs and

Administration at Rutgers University–

Newark, where he is codirector of the

Center for Experimental and Behavioral

Public Administration.

E-mail: sebastian.jilke@rutgers.edu

William Voorberg is a postdoctoral

researcher in the Department of Public

Administration and Sociology at Erasmus

University Rotterdam, where he coordinates

the Erasmus Governance Design Studio.

E-mail: voorberg@essb.eur.nl

Victor Bekkers is professor of

public administration and public policy

at Erasmus University Rotterdam. His

research interest primarily focuses on

the how the introduction of information

communication technology and media as

well as (co-creative) innovation processes

influence the shaping of different public

policy processes and public services. He is

also dean of the Erasmus School of Social

and Behavioral Sciences.

E-mail: bekkers@essb.eur.nl T o keep public services maintainable and

affordable, governments are increasingly

asking citizens to “pitch in and help ensure the

quality of life” (Brudney and England 1983 , 59). This

constitutes a fundamental change in the relationship

between the state and its inhabitants, in that citizens

are no longer passive receivers of public services.

Instead, they are seen as valuable participants in the

process of delivering public services (Osborne and

Brown 2011 ). As such, coproduction between public

organizations and citizens has become an important

element in the discussion about how the quality of

public service delivery can be improved. Citizens

have specific resources (such as time, expertise, and

local knowledge) that can be used in response to

contemporary problems facing the public sector. To

date, this has resulted in a variety of policy domains

in which citizens participate in public service delivery,

such as public transport (Gebauer, Johnson, and

Enquist 2010 ), health care (Leone et al. 2012 ; Pestoff

2012 ), and education ( Jakobsen 2013 ; Ostrom 1996 ).

Given the increasing importance of service delivery,

governments explore how citizens can be motivated to

step in and coproduce important public services (e.g.,

Alford 2002 ).

The literature on coproduction describes various ways

to stimulate public participation in service delivery,

for example, by sanctions, material rewards, intrinsic

rewards, solidary incentives, and expressive values

(e.g., Alford 2002 ; Lindahl, Lidén, and Lindblad

2011 ; Ostrom 1996 ; Pestoff 2006 ). In this article,

we pay specific attention to the effectiveness of

offering citizens financial rewards as a way to increase

their extrinsic motivation to coproduce. Whether

financial rewards stimulate coproduction is unclear.

Research Article