Giuseppe Attanasi (Université Côte d’Azur, Nice, France)

“Intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivators on creative collaboration: The effect of sharing rewards”

Abstract: Charness and Grieco (JEEA 2019) have experimentally shown that financial incentives have a positive impact on individualcreativity, but only in the case of “close” creativity, i.e., when there are constraints to the creative task that a subject has to accomplish. In this paper, we build on the same “close” creativity assignments of Charness and Grieco (2019)and analyze with undergraduate students and with creative entrepreneurs the interplay between monetary incentives and within-group cooperation vs. within-group competition in group creativity. We introduce a novel model of intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation to group collaboration in creativity and run a theory-driven experiment to test our experimental hypotheses on crowding out of intrinsic motivation due to extrinsic motivation to group creativity. We find more creativity in cooperative groups than (in competitive groups and) individually only when no monetary incentives are provided to group cooperation (sharing ideas) in the creative assignment. Therefore, while the results of Charness and Grieco (2019) show a positive interplay between monetary incentives (extrinsic individual motivation) and “close” creativity at the individual level, we provide evidence of a negative interplay between monetary incentives and “close” creativity at the group level (intrinsic group motivation). Furthermore, the latter effect is found more in the experimental sessions with creative entrepreneurs than in those with undergraduate students. Finally, psychological factors (risk attitudes) and geographical factors (cultural association, openness to others, cultural association) usually found to stimulate creativity only impact on the creativity produced in the laboratory experiments by undergraduate students: for creative entrepreneurs, we only detect a treatment effect, in line with our theoretical predictions.