PAYING FOR LEGITIMACY? THE SIGNALLING EFFECT OF MONETARY REWARDS IN INNOVATION CONTESTS

Author(s):  
CHRISTOPH IHL ◽  
ALEXANDER VOSSEN

Monetary rewards have become widely used to compensate user engagement in innovation contests. Building on literature on social judgement of organisations, we provide evidence on another important effect of monetary rewards in innovation contests, namely a signalling effect that may either enhance or lower a contest host’s legitimacy and subsequently users’ willingness to participate in the contest. Along three studies, we show that the signalling effect is especially beneficial for the innovation contest purposes that are incongruent with the host’s organisational stereotype, i.e., in cases where she lacks specific organisational traits that constitute users’ perception of organisational legitimacy. Offering a higher monetary reward in such a scenario allows hosts to overcome a lack of legitimacy and consequently foster user participation.

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (02) ◽  
pp. 1950014 ◽  
Author(s):  
CHRISTOPH IHL ◽  
ALEXANDER VOSSEN ◽  
FRANK PILLER

Practitioners increasingly use innovation contests to harness the knowledge of external crowds for internal innovation purposes in exchange for prize money. While some innovation contests have the objective to attract professional experts from distant fields to obtain technical solutions, other innovation contests primarily target customers or users in order to generate new product and service ideas. Hence, external crowds differ substantially across, but also within, innovation contests in terms of personal needs in the innovation domain. Drawing upon the private-collective model of innovation, we argue that participants’ “userness” in terms of personal needs gives rise to non-monetary reward expectations and collectively oriented participation as opposed to the private pursuit of monetary rewards emphasised in innovation contests. Hence, the effectiveness of monetary rewards in innovation contests is bound to certain participants and behaviours. In particular, participants weigh non-monetary rewards more strongly against monetary rewards (1) when their personal need in the innovation domain is high, and (2) when choosing to engage collectively in evaluating and commenting on other contributions as opposed to submitting own contributions. We find support for these hypotheses in an empirical study where user participation in a real innovation contest is regressed on survey-based measures of expected rewards that users perceive prior to the contest. The observed effect sizes of the proposed shifts from monetary to non-monetary rewards are so pronounced that for a given level of personal need and a given type of participation behaviour only either reward type is effective and a compensational relation between both types of rewards does not exist. Monetary rewards are even detrimental and lower user participation if the two proposed boundary conditions are taken together.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexandra M Rodman ◽  
Katherine Powers ◽  
Catherine Insel ◽  
Erik K Kastman ◽  
Katherine Kabotyanski ◽  
...  

Adults titrate the degree of physical effort they are willing to expend according to the magnitude of reward they expect to obtain, a process guided by incentive motivation. However, it remains unclear whether adolescents, who are undergoing normative developmental changes in cognitive and reward processing, translate incentive motivation into action in a way that is similarly tuned to reward value and economical in effort utilization. The present study adapted a classic physical effort paradigm to quantify age-related changes in motivation-based and strategic markers of effort exertion for monetary rewards from adolescence to early adulthood. One hundred and three participants aged 12-23 years completed a task that involved exerting low or high amounts of physical effort, in the form of a hand grip, to earn low or high amounts of money. Adolescents and young adults exhibited highly similar incentive-modulated effort for reward according to measures of peak grip force and speed, suggesting that motivation for monetary reward is consistent across age. However, young adults expended energy more economically and strategically: whereas adolescents were prone to exert excess physical effort beyond what was required to earn reward, young adults were more likely to strategically prepare before each grip phase and conserve energy by opting out of low reward trials. This work extends theoretical models of development of incentive-driven behavior by demonstrating that layered on similarity in motivational value for monetary reward, there are important differences in the way behavior is flexibly adjusted in the presence of reward from adolescence to young adulthood.


2017 ◽  
Vol 284 (1849) ◽  
pp. 20162759 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bowen J. Fung ◽  
Stefan Bode ◽  
Carsten Murawski

Temporal persistence refers to an individual's capacity to wait for future rewards, while forgoing possible alternatives. This requires a trade-off between the potential value of delayed rewards and opportunity costs, and is relevant to many real-world decisions, such as dieting. Theoretical models have previously suggested that high monetary reward rates, or positive energy balance, may result in decreased temporal persistence. In our study, 50 fasted participants engaged in a temporal persistence task, incentivised with monetary rewards. In alternating blocks of this task, rewards were delivered at delays drawn randomly from distributions with either a lower or higher maximum reward rate. During some blocks participants received either a caloric drink or water. We used survival analysis to estimate participants' probability of quitting conditional on the delay distribution and the consumed liquid. Participants had a higher probability of quitting in blocks with the higher reward rate. Furthermore, participants who consumed the caloric drink had a higher probability of quitting than those who consumed water. Our results support the predictions from the theoretical models, and importantly, suggest that both higher monetary reward rates and physiologically relevant rewards can decrease temporal persistence, which is a crucial determinant for survival in many species.


2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (5) ◽  
pp. 1486-1515 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yongrui Duan ◽  
Chen Chen ◽  
Jiazhen Huo

Purpose To encourage buyers to contribute product reviews, some online sellers offer monetary rewards. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the impact of monetary rewards on buyers’ purchase decisions and review contributions, as well as the impact on the seller’s price decisions and profit. Design/methodology/approach The authors consider an online seller in a two-stage setting. Prior to Stage 1, the profit-maximizing seller sets the price and decides whether to offer a monetary reward secretly to motivate online reviews. Then, a continuum of buyers arrives and makes purchase decisions at the beginning of each stage. First-stage buyers may contribute reviews if they are satisfied, which will affect demand in the second stage. Using this analytical framework, the authors analyze the impact of monetary rewards. Findings If the monetary reward is small, it decreases the seller’s profit and fails to generate more reviews. It also increases price, leading to a decline in total demand. Thus, when the reward is lower than a certain threshold, all buyers are worse off. Only when the reward exceeds the threshold are buyers who contribute reviews better off. Profit and total demand both increase in review quality, while the price may either increase or decrease in it. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to analyze theoretically the impact of monetary rewards on buyers’ purchase decisions, review contributions and on online sellers’ decisions.


Author(s):  
Xilin Li ◽  
Christopher K Hsee

Abstract That wealth has diminishing marginal utility is a fact of life, and that people be sensitive to their current level of wealth when deciding whether to pursue additional wealth is a requirement of rational choice. A series of experiments, spanning diverse contexts, reveal marginal-utility neglect—that people are rather insensitive to their current wealth when deciding how much effort to expend to acquire a monetary reward (e.g., how long to walk to claim a voucher). Moreover, the experiments demonstrate that a marginal-utility-prompting manipulation, which prompts people to consider their current wealth and their need for the reward given their current wealth, produces a significant sensitization effect—making financially richer (vs. less rich) individuals less (vs. more) willing to seek the reward. This manipulation is more effective than either prompting people to consider their current wealth alone or consider their need for the reward alone, suggesting that marginal-utility prompting does not merely draw people’s attention to their current wealth or merely draw their attention to their need for the reward, but links the two elements. This research elucidates the psychology of marginal utility and yields implications beyond the pursuit of monetary rewards.


2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 44
Author(s):  
Lauren Goss

The archival community continues to expand its reliance on digital tools to yield dynamic user engagement and increased access to collections. Editors Edward Benoit, III and Alexandra Eveleigh posit that the advancement of web technology during the last two decades increased the scope and impact of participatory archives. Benoit, currently a professor at the School of Library & Information Science at Louisiana State University, is the founder of the Virtual Footlocker Project, focusing on digital tools for soldiers to document their military experience. Eveleigh, Collections Information Manager at the Wellcome Collection, focuses her research on digital humanities and the impact of user participation.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
AT Walsh ◽  
David Podhortzer Carmel ◽  
David Harper ◽  
P Bolitho ◽  
Georgina Grimshaw

© 2020 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Irrelevant emotional stimuli often capture attention, disrupting ongoing cognitive processes. In two experiments, we examined whether availability of rewards (monetary and non-monetary) can prevent this attentional capture. Participants completed a central letter identification task while attempting to ignore negative, positive, and neutral distractor images that appeared above or below the targets on 25% of trials. Distraction was indexed by slowing on distractor-present trials. Half the participants completed the task with no performance-contingent reward, while the other half earned points for fast and accurate performance. In Experiment 1, points translated into monetary reward, but in Experiment 2, points had no monetary value. In both experiments, reward reduced capture by emotional distractors, showing that even non-monetary reward can aid attentional control. These findings suggest that motivation encourages use of effective cognitive control mechanisms that effectively prevent attentional capture, even when distractors are emotional.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (18) ◽  
pp. 6085
Author(s):  
Bence Ságvári ◽  
Attila Gulyás ◽  
Júlia Koltai

In this paper, we present the results of an exploratory study conducted in Hungary using a factorial design-based online survey to explore the willingness to participate in a future research project based on active and passive data collection via smartphones. Recently, the improvement of smart devices has enabled the collection of behavioural data on a previously unimaginable scale. However, the willingness to share this data is a key issue for the social sciences and often proves to be the biggest obstacle to conducting research. In this paper we use vignettes to test different (hypothetical) study settings that involve sensor data collection but differ in the organizer of the research, the purpose of the study and the type of collected data, the duration of data sharing, the number of incentives and the ability to suspend and review the collection of data. Besides the demographic profile of respondents, we also include behavioural and attitudinal variables to the models. Our results show that the content and context of the data collection significantly changes people’s willingness to participate, however their basic demographic characteristics (apart from age) and general level of trust seem to have no significant effect. This study is a first step in a larger project that involves the development of a complex smartphone-based research tool for hybrid (active and passive) data collection. The results presented in this paper help improve our experimental design to encourage participation by minimizing data sharing concerns and maximizing user participation and motivation.


2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-7 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Gibbs

Engaging users in an enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation is not new. Research espouses the benefits of user participation in such major projects, and often takes it for granted that users are involved. What is missing is an assessment of how best to engage users, when to involve them, and how much decision-making and influence they are allowed. This paper highlights findings from a single case study, and encourages future research to develop a newer understanding of user participation. Key components of successful user engagement include an integrated team approach, a balance of workload, the need for expertise at all levels, organizational and project commitment, effective decision-making, the reduction of competing resources or projects, and the maintenance of user participation post-implementation. As ERP systems mature and companies upgrade and maintain their systems, the concept of user participation should remain a core component of ERP research and practice.


2017 ◽  
Vol 48 (4) ◽  
pp. 464-469
Author(s):  
Paweł Kicman ◽  
Przemysław Bąbel

Abstract We investigated the effect of monetary rewards on the rate of pain discounting. Our aim, also, was to understand the effect of previous painful dental experiences on the rate of discounting pain. Two groups (N = 148) completed a discounting task. In the first group, delayed pain was weaker than immediate pain, and in the second group delayed pain was stronger than immediate pain. Two conditions were studied: pain was either accompanied by a monetary reward or not. We found that people preferred immediate pain when it was weaker than delayed pain; however, when delayed pain was stronger than immediate pain, there was no clear preference. In both groups the preference for immediate pain was higher when pain was accompanied by a monetary reward. Previous painful experiences were not related to the rate of discounting. It was concluded that the preference for delayed pain depends on the intensity of pain, and it can be modified by rewards that accompany pain.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document