Can prosocial incentives and self-chosen goals improve performance? An online real-effort experiment.

This article investigates incentive schemes that combine self-chosen goals with prosocial rewards—monetary contributions made to charities upon goal achievement—to motivate gig economy workers. Through a controlled experiment with Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) participants performing real-effort tasks, the study compares monetary incentives paid directly to workers with prosocial incentives donated to charities, varying reward sizes and measuring the impact on goal setting and performance. Results indicate that both monetary and prosocial incentives improve performance as reward size increases, but prosocial incentives particularly encourage workers to set higher goals, especially when their interests align with the charity's mission. A theoretical model explains these findings by showing that prosocial rewards avoid the crowding-out effect seen in monetary incentives and enhance intrinsic motivation, suggesting that combining self-chosen goals with prosocial incentives can be an effective strategy to boost productivity among gig workers.