Paying people can be a bad way to motivate them
I wrote last week about the role of incentives in online communities (and specifically how they can lead to behaviours that you might not want). In the post I give an example from Dan Ariely, a behavioural economist at MIT, that shows why incentives can breed unintended behaviours. Today I came across his YouTube channel and thought I would post his video explaining just this.
I’m actually working on the issue of incentivisation at the moment. Many clients we work with, building and managing online research communities, want to explore the different ways in which they can motivate people to take part in the community or in activities. Our approach is not to incentivise in the way traditional in market research (by giving financial incentives) as this moves the experience out of the social and into the market environment. We become traders of information rather than members of an online community of people working towards a shared goal, or with a shared set of interests and aims. However, sometimes we want to reward behaviours we want to encourage but keep this in the social context.
I’m working on a white paper discussing just these issues at the moment, so watch this space…
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Some more reading
- Do we need to incentivise participation in online communities?
- The Science of Irrationality: Why We Humans Behave So Strangely [Mind Matters]
- Is your market “predictably irrational”?
- Teams vs. Communities
Tim:
I used to participate in an online community that used two types of incentive: the first was a simple prize for the best post of the day. This encouraged people to start new topics in the forums and come up with new ideas.
The second incentive was giving each member a “status” based on time on the forums and number of posts. Although this is obviously able to be gamed, there was still a prestige factor, with the more senior members of the community being well respected.
I think in many situations this can as effective, if not more so, than monetary incentives.
Tim
4 November 2008, 11:07 pmStrategic Decision Analysis - Application Portfolio « TheYanec - Yaniv Yaakubovich:
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