Crowding Out - P2P Foundation - 1 views
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The curve indicates that while workers will initially chose to work more when paid more per hour, there is a point after which rational workers will choose to work less
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Kurt Laitner on 17 Jul 15in other words, people are financially motivated until they are financially secure, then other motivations come in
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"leaders" elsewhere will come and become your low-paid employees
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At that point, the leaders are no longer leaders of a community, and they turn out to be suckers after all, working for pittance, comparatively speaking
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so part of the dynamic is that everyone is paid fairly, if not there is the feeling of exploitation
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under certain structural conditions non-price-based production is extraordinarily robust
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There is, in fact, a massive amount of research that supports the idea that when you pay people to do something for you, they stop enjoying it, and distrust their own motivations. The mysterious something that goes away, and that “Factor X” even has a name: intrinsic motivation.
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the real question though is why, and whether it is the paying them that is the problem, or perhaps how that is determined, and who else gets what on what basis.. if you have to have them question the fairness of the situation, they will likely check out
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giving rewards to customers can actually undermine a company’s relationship with them
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It just is not so easy to assume that because people behave productively in one framework (the social process of peer production that is Wikipedia, free and open source software, or Digg), that you can take the same exact behavior, with the same exact set of people, and harness them to your goals by attaching a price to what previously they were doing in a social process.
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Extrinsic rewards suggest that there is actually an instrumental relationship at work, that you do the activity in order to get something else
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If you pay me for it, it must be work
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It’s what we would call a robust effect. It shows up in many contexts. And there’s been considerable testing to try to find out exactly why it works. A major school of thought is that there is an “Overjustification Effect.” (http://kozinets.net/archives/133)
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interesting examples of an effect called crowding
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Offering financial rewards for contributions to online communities basically means mixing external and intrinsic motivation.
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A good example is children who are paid by their parents for mowing the family lawn. Once they expect to receive money for that task, they are only willing to do it again if they indeed receive monetary compensation. The induced unwillingness to do anything for free may also extend to other household chores.
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Once ‘gold-stars’ were introduced as a symbolic reward for a certain amount of time spent practicing the instrument, the girl lost all interest in trying new, difficult pieces. Instead of aiming at improving her skills, her goal shifted towards spending time playing well-learned, easy pieces in order to receive the award (Deci with Flaste 1995)
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this is a more troubling example, as playing the harder pieces is also practicing - I would take this as a more complex mechanism at work - perhaps the reinterpretation by the girl that all playing was considered equal, due to the pricing mechanism, in which case the proximal solution would be to pay more for more complex pieces, or for levels of achievement - the question remains of why the extrinsic reward was introduced in the first place (unwillingness to practice as much as her parents wanted?) - which would indicate intrinsic motivation was insufficient in this case
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Suddenly, she managed to follow the prescription, as her own (intrinsic) motivation was recognized and thereby reinforced.
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or perhaps the key was to help her fit the medication into her day, which she was having trouble with...
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The introduction of a monetary fine transforms the relationship between parents and teachers from a non-monetary into a monetary one
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absolutely, in some sense the guilt of being late is replaced by a rationalization that you are paying them - it is still a rationalization, and parents in this case need to be reminded that staff have lives too to reinforce the moral suasion
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"The effects of external interventions on intrinsic motivation have been attributed to two psychological processes: (a) Impaired self-determination. When individuals perceive an external intervention to reduce their self-determination, they substitute intrinsic motivation by extrinsic control. Following Rotter (1966), the locus of control shifts from the inside to the outside of the person affected. Individuals who are forced to behave in a specific way by outside intervention, feel overjustified if they maintained their intrinsic motivation. (b) Impaired self-esteem. When an intervention from outside carries the notion that the actor's motivation is not acknowledged, his or her intrinsic motivation is effectively rejected. The person affected feels that his or her involvement and competence is not appreciated which debases its value. An intrinsically motivated person is taken away the chance to display his or her own interest and involvement in an activity when someone else offers a reward, or commands, to undertake it. As a result of impaired self-esteem, individuals reduce effort.
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these are finally very useful - so from (a) as long as self determination is maintained (actively) extrinsic reward should not shut down intrinsic motivation AND (b) so long as motivations are recognized and reward dimensions OTHER THAN financial continue to operate, extrinsic reward should not affect intrinsic motivation
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External interventions crowd-out intrinsic motivation if the individuals affected perceive them to be controlling
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External interventions crowd-in intrinsic motivation if the individuals concerned perceive it as supportive
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In that case, self-esteem is fostered, and individuals feel that they are given more freedom to act, thus enlarging self-determination
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so effectively a system needs to ensure it is acting on all dimensions of reward, or at least those most important to the particular participant, ego (pride, recognition, guilt reduction, feeling needed, being helpful, etc), money (sustenance, beyond which it is less potent), meaning/purpose etc. If one ran experiments controlling for financial self sufficiency, then providing appreciation and recognition as well as the introduced financial reward, they might yield different results
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cultural categories that oppose marketplace modes of behavior (or “market logics”) with the more family-like modes of behavior of caring and sharing that we observe in close-knit communities (”community logics”)
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this is labor, this is work, just do it.
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When communal logics are in effect, all sorts of norms of reciprocity, sacrifice, and gift-giving come into play: this is cool, this is right, this is fun
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So think about paying a kid to clean up their room, paying parishioners to go to church, paying people in a neighborhood to attend a town hall meeting, paying people to come out and vote. All these examples seem a little strange or forced. Why? Because they mix and match the communal with the market-oriented.
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and perhaps the problem is simply the conversion to money, rather than simply tracking these activities themselves (went to church 50 times this year!, helped 50 orphans get families!) (the latter being more recognition than reward
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Payment as disincentive. In his interesting book Freakonomics, economist Steven Levitt describes some counterintuitive facts about payment. One of the most interesting is that charging people who do the wrong thing often causes them to do it more, and paying people to do the right thing causes them to do it less.
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You direct people _away_ from any noble purpose you have, and instead towards grubbing for dollars
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and we are left with the challenge, how to work to purpose but still have our scarce goods needs sufficiently provided for? it has to be for love AND money
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When people work for a noble purpose, they are told that their work is highly valued. When people work for $0.75/hour, they are told that their work is very low-valued
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so pay them highly for highly valued labour, and don't forget to recognize them as well... no?
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you're going to have to fight your way through labour laws and tax issues all the way to bankruptcy
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this is a non argument, these are just interacting but separate problems, use ether or bitcoin, change legislation, what have you
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Market economics. If you have open content, I can copy your content to another wiki, not pay people, and still make money. So by paying contributors, you're pricing yourself out of the market.
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exactly, so use commonsource, they can use it all they want, but they have to flow through benefit (provide attribution, recognition, and any financial reward must be split fairly)
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You don't have to pay people to do what they want to do anyways. The labour cost for leisure activities is $0. And nobody is going to work on a wiki doing things they don't want to do.
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wow, exploitative in the extreme - no one can afford to do work for free, it cuts into paid work, family time etc. if they are passionate about something they will do it for free if they cannot get permission to do it for sustenance, but they still need to sustain themselves, and they are making opportunity cost sacrifices, and if you are in turn making money off of this you are an asshole.. go ahead look in the mirror and say "I am an asshole"
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No fair system. There's simply no fair, automated and auditable way to divvy up the money
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this is an utter cop out - figure out what is close enough to fair and iterate forward to improve it, wow
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too complicated to do automatically. But if you have a subjective system -- have a human being evaluate contributions to an article and portion out payments -- it will be subject to constant challenges, endless debates, and a lot of community frustration.
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yes to the human evaluation part, but "it's too complicated" is disingenuous at the least
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Gaming the system. People are really smart. If there's money to be made, they'll figure out how to game your payment system to get more money than they actually deserve
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yes indeed, so get your metrics right, and be prepared to adjust them as they are gamed - and ultimately, as financial penalties are to BP, even if some people game the system, can we better the gaming of the capitalist system.. it's a low bar I know
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They'll be trying to get as much money out of you as possible, and you'll be trying to give as little as you can to them
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If you can't convince people that working on your project is worth their unpaid time, then there's probably something wrong with your project.
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People are going to be able to sense that -- it's going to look like a cover-up, something sleazy
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Donate.
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Thank-you gifts
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Pay bounties
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good way to get people to compete ineffectively instead of cooperating on a solution, the lottery mechanism is evil
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while good issue are brought up in this article, the solutions offered are myopic and the explanations of the observed effects not satisfying
