Social Approval as an Incentive : The Voluntary Provision of Public Goods in Social Production Communities

The voluntary provision of public goods is a puzzle for scholars from economics and related disciplines. While different incentives have been proposed in the existing literature, this book examines social approval as a nonmonetary incentive for the voluntary provision of public goods using game theory and experimental economics. The voluntary provision of public goods is illustrated by using social production as an example. Social production includes different incarnations of large-scale unpaid work, like user-led innovation, user-generated content, and open source software.