Citizen Contribution to Local Public Services: Field Experiments in Institutions Incorporating Social Information

研究人员和政策制定者认为公民对公共产品的贡献越来越重要。其中包括志愿服务，使社区成为更好的地方。经典的问题是，有强烈的动机不提供这些商品，这源于社会规范和人们时间上的竞争压力。行为经济学和集体行动研究的一个核心思想是，向公民提供信息的方式很重要。这可能包括谁提出请求，传达了什么样的社会规范，以及如何记录其他参与者的行为。关键的想法是，一个外部机构，我们称之为机构，能够以鼓励和帮助公民克服参与障碍的方式呈现这些信息。我们特别感兴趣的是，来自志愿者等知名人士的推荐是否能促进公民行动，以及与其他公众人物相比，提及政治家是否会产生负面影响（尽管总体上是积极的）。我们有兴趣了解传达社会规范是否重要。我们想知道，向公民提供反馈的形式是否会产生更多的反应。我们将以不同的方式反馈信息，以研究如何加强公民参与。重要的是，我们感兴趣的是社会信息的效果是否会持续，或者效果是否会减弱，我们的方法是随机对照试验，它可以隔离干预的效果。该提案将对两种公民行动进行试验。第一个是关于公民对时间银行的贡献，这是关于记录人们做志愿者的时间。我们将与十个当地的时间银行合作，通过随机分配的信件招募人员，这些信件传达了杰出政治家，社区代表或同胞的赞扬。一旦我们招募了这些人，我们将监控他们的出勤率和活动，并鼓励他们做出贡献。我们将开展一项类似的随机对照试验，招募学生参加一项活动，并继续开展志愿行动。我们再一次测试了一个政治家和重要人物的认可的重要性，这个人承诺自己对时间银行的贡献将增加贡献。同样，我们将通过反馈来监控这一点，但将增加一个额外的功能，即财务激励是否会增加贡献或挤出贡献。有了这些调查结果，我们将能够找出公共机构可以做些什么来增加公民的自愿贡献，特别是通过向他们提供鼓励自愿贡献时间的信息。

Citizen contributions to public goods are regarded as increasingly important by researchers and policy-makers. These include volunteering to make communities better places. The classic problem is that there are strong incentives for these goods not to be provided, which derive from social norms and competing pressures on people's time. A core idea in recent thinking in behavioural economics and the study of collective action, is that the way information is presented to citizens matters. This can include who makes the request, what social norm is conveyed, and how the behaviour of other participants is recorded. The key idea is that an external agency, what we call an institution, is capable of presenting these messages in ways that are encouraging and help citizens overcome obstacles to participating. We are particularly interested in whether recommendations from prominent people such as those in the voluntary sector can promote civic action, and whether the mentioning of politicians might have a downward effect when compared to other public figures (while being positive overall). We are interested in finding out whether conveying the social norm is important. We want to know whether the form of feedback to citizens creates more of a response. We will feedback information in different ways to examine how it enhances citizen participation. Critically, we are interested in whether the effect of social information is sustained in time or whether the effect diminishes.Our method is the randomized controlled trial, which can isolate the effect of an intervention. The proposal will carry out experiments on two kinds of citizen action. The first is about citizen contributions to a timebank, which is about logging people's time for volunteering. We will work with ten local timebanks, seeing to recruit people by a randomly allocated letter that conveys a commendation from a prominent politician, community representative or fellow citizen. Once we have recruited these people we will monitor their attendance and activities, and see to encourage them to contribute. We will carry out a similar randomised controlled trial to recruit students to an event and to continue voluntary action. Again we test the importance of an endorsement by a politician and important person, with the idea that this person's promised own contribution to a timebank will increase contributions. Again we will monitor this by feedback, but will add an additional feature, whether a financial incentive will increase contributions or crowd them out. With these findings we will be in a position to find out what things public institutions can do to increase voluntary contributions by citizens, in particular by providing them with information that encourages the voluntary donation of time.