Intrinsic Motivation and the Logic of Collective Action: The Impact of Selective Incentives

摘要

I integrate the notion of intrinsic motivation, applied to economics most notably by Frey (1997), into the logic of individual contributions toward collective goods as analyzed since Olson ([1965] 1971). This illuminates the many and various ways through which the intrinsic motivation to contribute toward such goods can be crowded out by the application of selective incentives. I suggest that the crowding-out effect increases the cost to society of organizing the provision of collective goods and argue in favor of designing selective incentives that mitigate this effect.