On the Demand and Effectiveness of Reward in Voluntary Contribution Mechanisms. A Note

This note aims at discussing the reasons why individuals facing situations of anonymous interaction with strangers rarely decide to remunerate pro-social behaviours. Moreover, economic e- xperiments show that, when implemented, rewards are quite ineffective in promoting cooperation. Two key explanations are discussed: rewarding does not enable to yell out the negative emotions that instead can be expressed by assigning a sanction. On the other hand, rewards are received by subjects holding an intrinsic motivation to contribute and this could undermine the effectiveness of anextrinsic motivation like reward.