Willingness to volunteer among remote workers is insensitive to the team size
Willingness to volunteer among remote workers is insensitive to the team size
Volunteering is a widespread allocation mechanism in the workplace. It emerges naturally in software development or the generation of online knowledge platforms. Using a field experiment with more than 2,000 workers, we study the effect of team size on volunteering in an online labor market. In contrast to our theoretical predictions and previous research, we find no effect of team size on volunteering, although workers react to free-riding incentives, and volunteering is perceived as costly. Eliciting workers’ beliefs about their co-workers’ volunteering reveals conditional volunteering as the primary driver of our results: Workers tend to volunteer more when they believe that others are volunteering, even when doing so is highly inefficient. Using additional experiments, we identify the importance of the task itself as an essential mitigating factor for those results.
Hillenbrand, Adrian
9445a336-18e7-4801-a3b2-a2460935b6c9
Werner, Tobias
b1f092c4-e6b8-42e1-b615-4e150cd4b165
Winter, Fabian
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Hillenbrand, Adrian
9445a336-18e7-4801-a3b2-a2460935b6c9
Werner, Tobias
b1f092c4-e6b8-42e1-b615-4e150cd4b165
Winter, Fabian
14c485c3-91c9-4818-8190-ab2eab0e48dc
Hillenbrand, Adrian, Werner, Tobias and Winter, Fabian
(2025)
Willingness to volunteer among remote workers is insensitive to the team size.
Experimental Economics.
(doi:10.1017/eec.2024.13).
Abstract
Volunteering is a widespread allocation mechanism in the workplace. It emerges naturally in software development or the generation of online knowledge platforms. Using a field experiment with more than 2,000 workers, we study the effect of team size on volunteering in an online labor market. In contrast to our theoretical predictions and previous research, we find no effect of team size on volunteering, although workers react to free-riding incentives, and volunteering is perceived as costly. Eliciting workers’ beliefs about their co-workers’ volunteering reveals conditional volunteering as the primary driver of our results: Workers tend to volunteer more when they believe that others are volunteering, even when doing so is highly inefficient. Using additional experiments, we identify the importance of the task itself as an essential mitigating factor for those results.
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willingness-to-volunteer-among-remote-workers-is-insensitive-to-the-team-size
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Accepted/In Press date: 22 December 2024
e-pub ahead of print date: 30 April 2025
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 505956
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/505956
ISSN: 1386-4157
PURE UUID: 73f16e9c-8c0b-469b-b5ba-36fe5f73e790
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Date deposited: 24 Oct 2025 16:35
Last modified: 15 Nov 2025 03:26
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Author:
Adrian Hillenbrand
Author:
Tobias Werner
Author:
Fabian Winter
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