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How to hire helpers? Evidence from a field experiment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 March 2025

Julian Conrads ,
Bernd Irlenbusch ,
Tommaso Reggiani ,
Rainer Michael Rilke  and
Dirk Sliwka
Julian Conrads*
Affiliation:
Department of Corporate Development and Business Ethics, University of Cologne, Albertus-Magnus-Platz, 50923 Cologne, Germany
Bernd Irlenbusch*
Affiliation:
Department of Corporate Development and Business Ethics, University of Cologne, Albertus-Magnus-Platz, 50923 Cologne, Germany
Tommaso Reggiani*
Affiliation:
Department of Corporate Development and Business Ethics, University of Cologne, Albertus-Magnus-Platz, 50923 Cologne, Germany
Rainer Michael Rilke*
Affiliation:
Department of Corporate Development and Business Ethics, University of Cologne, Albertus-Magnus-Platz, 50923 Cologne, Germany
Dirk Sliwka*
Affiliation:
Department of Personnel Economics, University of Cologne, Albertus-Magnus-Platz, 50923 Cologne, Germany
*
julian.conrads@uni-koeln.de
bernd.irlenbusch@uni-koeln.de
tommaso.reggiani@uni-koeln.de
rainer.rilke@uni-koeln.de
dirk.sliwka@uni-koeln.de
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Abstract

How to hire voluntary helpers? We shed new light on this question by reporting a field experiment in which we invited 2859 students to help at the ‘ESA Europe 2012’ conference. Invitation emails varied non-monetary and monetary incentives to convince subjects to offer help. Students could apply to help at the conference and, if so, also specify the working time they wanted to provide. Just asking subjects to volunteer or offering them a certificate turned out to be significantly more motivating than mentioning that the regular conference fee would be waived for helpers. By means of an online-survey experiment, we find that intrinsic motivation to help is likely to have been crowded out by mentioning the waived fee. Increasing monetary incentives by varying hourly wages of 1, 5, and 10 Euros shows positive effects on the number of applications and on the working time offered. However, when comparing these results with treatments without any monetary compensation, the number of applications could not be increased by offering money and may even be reduced.

Keywords

RecruitmentVoluntary workMonetary incentivesField experiment

JEL classification

J33: Compensation Packages • Payment Methods M52: Compensation and Compensation Methods and Their Effects C93: Field Experiments
Type
Original Paper
Information
Experimental Economics , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , September 2016 , pp. 577 - 594
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 Economic Science Association

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Footnotes

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-015-9455-y) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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