Josh Albrecht wrote:
> I think that people would contribute unpaid bandwidth to the network
> for the same reason that they do now (altruism), especially if it were
> the default setting (how many people really change the defaults?).
> However, I see the incentives (bandwidth/monetary) as important to get
> lots more people using Tor in the first place, which would hopefully
> increase the total amount of free/unpaid bandwidth available through
> the network.
Introducing a paid option would probably drive non-paid volunteers away.
That's because of the "Crowding-out Effect" which says that efforts to
motivate people extrinsically (through money) will often demotivate people
whose motivation is intrinsic ("doing what is right" or" doing something for
the sake of it").
See, for example, Yochai Benkler, "The Wealth of Networks" (Yale University
Press, 2006), p. 93-95:
A number of scholars, primarily in psychology and economics, have
attempted to resolve this question [why the British all-volunteer based
blood donor system worked much better than the old American
payment-based one] both empirically and theoretically. The most
systematic work within economics is that of Swiss economist Bruno Frey
and various collaborators, building on the work of psychologist Edward
Deci. A simple statement of this model is that individuals have
intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Extrinsic motivations are imposed
on individuals from the outside. They take the form of either offers of
money for, or prices imposed on, behavior, or threats of punishment or
reward from a manager or a judge for complying with, or failing to
comply with, specifically prescribed behavior. Intrinsic motivations
are reasons for action that come from within the person, such as
pleasure or personal satisfaction. Extrinsic motivations are said to
"crowd out" intrinsic motivations because they (a) impair
self-determination--that is, people feel pressured by an external
force, and therefore feel overjustified in maintaining their intrinsic
motivation rather than complying with the will of the source of the
extrinsic reward; or (b) impair self-esteem--they cause individuals to
feel that their internal motivation is rejected, not valued, and as a
result, their self-esteem is diminished, causing them to reduce effort.
Intuitively, this model relies on there being a culturally contingent
notion of what one "ought" to do if one is a well-adjusted human being
and member of a decent society. Being offered money to do something you
know you "ought" to do, and that self-respecting members of society
usually in fact do, implies that the person offering the money believes
that you are not a well-adjusted human being or an equally respectable
member of society. This causes the person offered the money either to
believe the offerer, and thereby lose self-esteem and reduce effort, or
to resent him and resist the offer. A similar causal explanation is
formalized by Roland Benabou and Jean Tirole, who claim that the person
receiving the monetary incentives infers that the person offering the
compensation does not trust the offeree to do the right thing, or to do
it well of their own accord. The offeree's self-confidence and
intrinsic motivation to succeed are reduced to the extent that the
offeree believes that the offerer--a manager or parent, for example--is
better situated to judge the offeree's abilities.
More powerful than the theoretical literature is the substantial
empirical literature--including field and laboratory experiments,
econometrics, and surveys--that has developed since the mid-1990s to
test the hypotheses of this model of human motivation. Across many
different settings, researchers have found substantial evidence that,
under some circumstances, adding money for an activity previously
undertaken without price compensation reduces, rather than increases,
the level of activity. The work has covered contexts as diverse as the
willingness of employees to work more or to share their experience and
knowledge with team members, of communities to accept locally
undesirable land uses, or of parents to pick up children from day-care
centers punctually. The results of this empirical literature strongly
suggest that across various domains some displacement or crowding out
can be identified between monetary rewards and nonmonetary motivations.
This does not mean that offering monetary incentives does not increase
extrinsic rewards--it does. Where extrinsic rewards dominate, this will
increase the activity rewarded as usually predicted in economics.
However, the effect on intrinsic motivation, at least sometimes,
operates in the opposite direction. Where intrinsic motivation is an
important factor because pricing and contracting are difficult to
achieve, or because the payment that can be offered is relatively low,
the aggregate effect may be negative. Persuading experienced employees
to communicate their tacit knowledge to the teams they work with is a
good example of the type of behavior that is very hard to specify for
efficient pricing, and therefore occurs more effectively through social
motivations for teamwork than through payments. Negative effects of
small payments on participation in work that was otherwise
volunteer-based are an example of low payments recruiting relatively
few people, but making others shift their efforts elsewhere and thereby
reducing, rather than increasing, the total level of volunteering for
the job.
Because of the Crowding-out Effect, systems tend to work best if either
"everybody is paid" (of the people doing a certain job, e.g. contributing
bandwidth), or else "nobody is paid." You cannot have it both ways.
Best regards
Christian
--
|-------- Dr. Christian Siefkes --------- christian@xxxxxxxxxxx ---------
| Homepage: http://www.siefkes.net/ | Blog: http://www.keimform.de/
| Peer Production in the Physical World: http://peerconomy.org/
|------------------------------------------ OpenPGP Key ID: 0x346452D8 --
A matter of internal security: the age-old cry of the oppressor.
-- Capt. Picard, in "Star Trek: The Next Generation"
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