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About this collection

Extent

1 digital object.

Cite This Work

Lyons, Elizabeth; Zhang, Laurina (2019). Data from: Trade-offs in motivating volunteer effort: Experimental evidence on voluntary contributions to science. UC San Diego Library Digital Collections. https://doi.org/10.6075/J0N58JRK

Description

This collection includes data used in the analysis reported in "Trade-offs in motivating volunteer effort: Experimental evidence on voluntary contributions to science" (Lyons & Zhang, 2019). The analysis reports on the results of a field experiment run on the world's largest crowd science platform, Zooniverse. Participants in the experiment were invited to contribute to a science project posted on Zooniverse, with one third of invitees randomly receiving additional information on the scientific output value of project contributions and another third randomly receiving information on the labor input value of project contributions. We examine the effects of this information on the quantity and quality of output, and on contributor characteristics as measured by a voluntary survey. We find significant heterogeneity in the motivations and ability of contributors to crowd science. Moreover, we find that both of the information interventions lead to significant decreases in the quantity and increases in the quality of contributions.

Date Collected

• 2017-06 to 2017-08

Date Issued

• 2019

Co Principal Investigators

• Lyons, Elizabeth
• Zhang, Laurina

Funding

National Bureau of Economic Research

Topics

• Crowd science
• Crowdsourcing
• Economics of science
• Field experiment
• Volunteer
• Zooniverse

Formats

View formats within this collection

• data
• text

Language

• English

Identifier

Identifier: Elizabeth Lyons: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2334-2153

Related Resources

Primary associated publication

• Lyons E, Zhang L (2019) Trade-offs in motivating volunteer effort: Experimental evidence on voluntary contributions to science. PLoS ONE 14(11): e0224946. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0224946

Other resource

• Zooniverse website (zooniverse.org)